Spinning Circle at the Mill

An artful Facebook post after a research event, a spinning circle held at a state heritage listed former mill, is used to explore the intersection of craftivism and the politics around the future of this site. This article takes a new materialism approach to explore the dynamic interactions (intra-actions) and shifting power relations around place (territorialisations). Both the spinning circle and the post were a gentle activism, or as Greer (12) describes it, craftivism, whose essence lies in ‘creating something that gets people to ask questions’. In 2018, I conducted the research event, the Spinning Circle at the Mill, inviting the Spinners, Weavers, and Fibre Artisans of Ipswich group to hold a spinning circle at the former Queensland Woollen Manufacturing Company, now an empty factory space on the state’s heritage list. The event was part of a larger piece of research considering the generative nature of heritage. As the fibre artists worked, we yarned about their connections with the mill-site, its largely female workforce, and imagined what the future might hold for this heritage place. Before the day’s events started, I was busy arranging a table for the morning tea and setting out some artefacts and books that participants had brought. I noticed a few of the fibre artists wandering around the factory with a spinning wheel. I wasn’t quite sure what they were doing, and called them back a couple of times, worried everyone would wander off into the cavernous mill space. They returned, eventually, and we got on with the session. After the event, one artist, Mieke den Otter, shared a post Facebook (see fig. 1). When I saw the post, I laughed out loud – and it has haunted me. Her curation of the text and carefully placed wheel in the post’s photograph negotiated time, space and political boundaries with warmth and humour. Here in the realm of Facebook was a piece of data that “glowed”, exerting “a kind of fascination”, that animates further thought (MacLure 228). Social media posts are performative – they affect. Images created and shared extend what heritage sites can do – provoking, expressing new perspectives, and challenging narratives playfully though art. Posts shift conversations. Fig. 1: Facebook post from the Spinning Circle at the Mill. What does this Facebook post create? What does this assemblage, this intentional cutting-together of [spinning wheel-graffiti – woollen mill heritage – Facebook – photograph – post text] do? Methods, Materialities, and Entanglements This article uses a new materialism methodological framing to consider the dynamics of the events. It draws on Barad’s concepts of agential cuts – the intra-actions of elements cut ‘together-apart’, forming together and separating from others. Barad (Meeting 168) describes the dynamics of intra-actions as diffractions. Diffractions conjure up rippled waves crossing over, each disrupting the other, creating new patterns, the two waves changed and inseparable through the transition and never the same after. Barad’s term ‘intra-action’ considers the changes and inseparability occurring through interactions. Deleuze and Guattari‘s consideration of the dynamism of assemblages is also useful for thinking through craftivism. Their work offers two key pairings here: the interplay of materiality with expression, and the way physical and political territories are inhabited, highlighting the dynamic relations of power (territorialisations) that constantly challenge the boundaries. These views into the data help us discern what craft and craftivism can do, physically and through its presence on social media. We’ll start with the crafters’ physical presence at the mill. Ten members of the Spinners, Weavers, and Fibre Artists of Ipswich participated in the Spinning Circle, plus a Council Heritage officer. Two colleagues assisted me with sound recording and photographs. The event occurred 46 years after the mill closed its doors in 1971, having manufactured textiles for ninety-four years. The event was conducted under ethics approval (GU 2017/763), and I have permission from Mieke to write about her Facebook post. The spinning event at the mill was inspired by the go-along method (Kusenbach), which recognises the potential of accessing lived experiences in situ. The circle could be called a go-along focus group. What I was tapping into was the spinners encountering the empty mill: not their ‘natural environment’ but a space they emotionally connected with through their craft. Some had worked at one of the city’s woollen mills, and all were aware of the mills as part of the heritage of Ipswich. I further drew on the work of Edensor in recognising affects produced by walking through industrial ruins, decentring everyday divisions between past and present. I wanted the spinners to be affected by this unfamiliar space, in helping them consider what the space could be. We started by walking the mill site, becoming absorbed in both its emptiness and the haunting presences as a Council heritage officer and I guided them through the spaces. The two participants who had worked at other Ipswich mills shared some of their stories as we walked. Then the spinners sat in a circle to spin, knit, craft, and yarn, and it became a focus group where we imagined possible mill futures. Weavings and Intra-Actions of an Image The interplay of materiality and expression is a co-functioning of things, relations, languages, words, and meanings (Anderson and McFarlane). The point is awareness of what is being produced and understanding the conditions and intra-actions enabling and embedded in its production. Delving into the materialities draws other “entanglements” (Barad) – influences operating at a distance, often in a different space or temporality. Through entanglements, a complex web of phenomena emerges as elements come together and are set apart. Entanglements may be sensed rather than seen, felt rather than thought. Assemblages and their entities are not static, but act at various intensities and rhythms, affecting each other. Considering these dynamics as intra-actions emphasises that actions affect all that are connected though an event, blurring boundaries: there is no separation. In the Facebook post’s image, the physical spinning wheel has become part of the graffiti and graffiti part of the wheel, intra-acting, changing both, expressing something new. The intra-action extends to those setting up the image, photographing, observing, then the larger audience on Facebook. Affects flow and ripple through intra-actions across time, all the way to writing this article and beyond. The photo composition was purposeful; the position carefully sought out. The spinning wheel in its material expression is a modern tower wheel – compact for travel – and is used by many spinners. It expresses that the craft is alive and well, and its technologies are evolving. The wheel design, while modern, harks back to the seventeenth-century European adaption of this technology and to the cottage manufacture of textiles prior to the industrial revolution. No spinning wheels were present at the Ipswich mills. The industrial spinning mules and frames of the mill were about speed and volume. Hands worked the machines mainly to fix broken threads, not as a creative force as with a wheel, but rather to enable the machines to overcome their mechanical limitations. Bringing the wheels to the factory expresses a playful juxtaposition between manufacturing and crafting. After ceasing operations as a woollen mill in 1971, the building was used as plywood factory (Boral-Hancock Plywood) from 1984 until 2011 – it has been left empty since. Shortly after, the street artists ‘invaded’ creating this extensive graffiti gallery, which includes some standout-art artworks (see fig. 2). The background graffiti in the Facebook post shows a comfy lounge room, with sofa and TV. The graffiti expresses a scene totally anomalous to a hyper-heated, humid, noisy woollen mill or plywood factory. It possibly reflected the artist’s longing for some home comforts. The image also merged the artist’s presence with the graffiti. An earlier Facebook post about the day mentioned the artists seeking shelter and squatting at the mill. Around the factory the occasional cat image appears, just as a cat might. I’m not sure if they are a house cat, or a factory cat to deal with rodents, but they express comfort, and are likely by the same artist (see fig. 3).  Fig. 2: An example of the range of graffiti at the mill. Image by Joan Kelly 2018. Fig. 3: An example of a cat drawn at the mill. Image by J. Hanley 2017. The text of the spinning wheel post is also deeply resonant: ‘every home needs a wheel’installation at the Old mill site The post’s text conjures pictures of homes with a spinning wheel at the ready. For a time, in pre-industrial Europe, spinning wheels were a necessary household item for clothing one’s own family and to make a living. Especially in agricultural districts, many families needed a wheel, and spinners worked long hours for economic survival (Pinchbeck). Clearly, today, other than for textile crafters, a spinning wheel is not a general item needed for the home – it’s a poignant joke that is created. Terming the wheel placement “an installation” elevates the assemblage of wheel and graffiti both as serious artwork and a production. Beyond that, the post works as a subtle form of activism. At the time of the visit to the mill, the site was undergoing conservation work and was not available for public use. To be in the space was exceptional: the was asserting the artist’s presence and staking a claim to the territory on behalf of the artists of Ipswich. Re/De-Territorialisations Territorialisations are the dynamics of the shifting boundaries of belonging and exclusion, power and subversion. Every assemblage carves out territory from the milieux, in this case the physical mill space, its former use as a texti