Abstract
Women have stitched collectively for millennia, building friendship and solidarity around home and family life (Barber, 1996) whilst also telling stories that shared their lived experiences (Warner, 2014). Inspired by this ancient combination of craft and companionship, and frustrated at the persistence of domestic labour as so-called women’s work (McMunn, 2019), academic Vanessa Marr founded the awarding-wining Domestic Dusters project. Built on the principle of collaboration through craft (Ravetz et al, 2013), with change-making intention (Ellis 2004), this practice-based research initiative invites women from across the world to embroider a duster, a soft yellow cleaning cloth popular the UK, with their gendered experiences of domesticity. Its core methods are hand-embroidery, embodying the historic and feminine associations of this craft (Parker, 1984), and the critical positioning of the duster as an object to think with (Turkle 2007). The project is shared worldwide through workshops and exhibitions, alongside publications that explore its approach as drawing with thread (Marr, 2019), feminist storytelling (Marr, 2021) and autoethnography (Marr, 2023, 2025). This work captures an inherently female dialogue, embodied in craft, that asks what we can learn from our foremothers practice, and asserts the value of craft as a method for collective enquiry.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Handbook on Craft as Method |
| Subtitle of host publication | The scholarship of making: Craft as method, as knowing, as decolonisation, and connecting |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - Mar 2025 |