Astrid Reischwitz
Astrid Reischwitz
Spin Club Stories
Harcover
30 x 24 cm
128 pages
78 color illustrations
2023
Kehrer Verlag
About the Book:
In Spin Club Stories, Astrid Reischwitz explores personal and cultural memory influenced by her upbringing in a small farming village in Northern Germany. She uses keepsakes from family life, old photographs and embroidered fabric from the village to build a world of memory, identity and home. The Boston based artist takes cues from the old tradition of spin clubs in her village, where village women met to spin wool and create needlework— and share stories while they worked. She transforms this tradition of storytelling into a visual journey. Her own embroidered designs are partial representations of her ancestral linens, emphasizing the fragmentary nature of recollection. By following the stitches in these fabrics, she follows a path through the lives of her ancestors and converses with the past.
Book review by Branden Zavaleta |
Seeing the browned or black and white photos of past generations always seems to feel like the subjects are encased in amber. That there’s a dramatic barrier between yourself and their world. And when the subject is a north german farming town– something that is already distant from most lives– seeing images of their lifestyles can be closer to a dream than a memory.
But in Spin Club Stories, Asterid Reischwitz has found an immersive way to break down these barriers. In the same way that sewing and embroidery were intertwined with the lives of her subjects, Reischwitz has intertwined their fabric work alongside their photos. Life in this small German farming village was very textural– the people knew the smell of wet straw, the color of dawn light on timber flooring. Reischwitz’s mixed-media approach mimics this sensory lifestyle by injecting objects that were very close to them. By crumpling table cloths alongside a joyous celebration, or by draping an oppressive black sheet over an image of an uncomfortable girl by a slaughtered pig.
For the women of this village, their spin club was their art and their history. So maybe it’s not surprising how well these art forms pair with each other. The women in Reischwitz’s childhood used embroidery to capture memories and moments– table clothes were sewn for events, and tapestries were sewn to memorialize them– and the photographer does the same by committing the scenes to film. Together, the clothwork and photography create a fuller understanding of these lost moments. The stitching not only adds a splash of color, but a sense of touch that we’re all familiar with, opening the door for us to enter these places and to know these people.
To memorialize the women and lifestyles of this village is the key interest of Spin Club Stories. Just as their woven work would have been inherited by daughters, Reischwitz passes these images down to us. In one of the more strikingly symbolic images, a woven hand reaches out for an image of two hands cupping a warm light. It’s hard not to see this as a hand reaching out across generations, a passing of the torch across time.
And across the book, the symbolism reaches out to the viewer. These are images to consider and examine as much as they are to be intuitively felt. An image of dappled light is cross stitched with a patch of yellow–is this an example of life being translated to embroidery, a lesson for us readers? A portrait of a woman is half covered by a tablecloth that she sewed– does it speak to the reach of her sewn work, and how she is eclipsed by it? The abstract style of the collages speak to each of us individually. Quietly, the book inspires others to continue the work of this spin club, to weave cloth and to tell stories. The spirit of the club lives on through the book, and it’s with a loving hand that Reischwitz has woven it.
