Embroideries of the pinching past

Astrid Reischwitz

Reischwitz visualises her past, including hidden stories from her family.

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Artdoc

The old craft of embroidery, decorating fabric with a thread, is re-evaluated and reused by artists who insert it in their artworks as a metaphor for storytelling, especially stories from the past. Astrid Reischwitz, who left Germany as a young woman, and is now living in the United States, used the embroidery to relive her childhood memories of the Spin Clubs in northern Germany. With her work, she visualises her past, including hidden stories from her family and the culture she grew up in, to rebuild her lost roots. The Spin Club Tapestry and Stories from the kitchen table revive the ancient tradition of telling and remembering local stories.

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© Astrid Reischwitz | Prickly, Stories from the Kitchen Table

In the series Spin Club Tapestry, Astrid Reischwitz used the old tapestries that villagers from her birth town in Lower Saxony, Germany, produced as the starting point of her artwork. Her composites combine images of stained and time-worn embroidered spin club fabrics with new and old photographs. The patterns she stitched are abstractions of the original spin club designs, representing fragments of memory. "I grew up in a small farming village in northern Germany. It's a traditional village where still old traditions are followed. You can feel that even nowadays. The fabric is a visual bond and the glue between the present and past. In the Spin Clubs, women, who first joined as teenagers, would meet in groups of five or six and stay together in the same constellation as a support group throughout their lives. In the Spin Clubs, women have to deal with the same people their entire lives, which can be restrictive. I did some research, but there is little documentation about the clubs. I assume the tradition goes back to the Middle Ages when women would start meeting in wintertime when they had time to meet and didn't have to do as much farming work as in summer and fall. They would spin the wool, spin linen, do embroidery, and knitting and mending."

The Spin Clubs could be seen as storytelling groups because the local women used to talk about their lives during the handwork. This element was an essential part of the series. Astrid Reischwitz remembered she was hiding beneath her grandmother's coffee table as a child, where she heard women's voices in the 'Spinneklump' talking in the local Plattdeutsch dialect. "The storytelling element was important back then in the Middle Ages. People shared their life stories and passed on knowledge from one generation to the next. For Spin Club Tapestry, I started embroidering myself, and I connected these pieces to the photographs of the village. They are meant to be fractions of memory. The old photos come from other families in my native village. I scan them and use them in my work, and usually, when I add a contemporary image, it's one I took in the village as well."

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© Astrid Reischwitz | Broken Stories from the Kitchen Table

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Roots of identity

Spinning involves removing wool fibres from a mass and twisting them together to form a continuous thread. It could be considered as creating a coherent story from many different memories. Accordingly, with their embroideries, the Spin Clubs seem an appropriate metaphor for personal storytelling. Reischwitz confirms this idea and adds: "Sometimes the fabric is deteriorated, and I put my embroidery on top of that part. I try to fill in the memory of something in the past. I want to figure out what happened in the past, but the memory is already lost. It's deteriorated. I want to retrieve the long-gone memory, filling it in with my embroidery. Memory is not static. It changes whenever I retrieve a memory."

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Memory is not static. It changes whenever I retrieve a memory.

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The memories from the past serve as a bond to her youth after Reischwitz immigrated to the USA. "Through this work, I was able to reshape my personal roots. It's important to know yourself and where you are positioned in this world, especially when you live far away from your hometown. The memories create my identity. What can I take from my culture, and how does it define me?"
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© Astrid Reischwitz | Lüttje Föster, Stories from the Kitchen Table
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© Astrid Reischwitz | Red Vessel, Spin Club Tapestry

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‍Hidden stories

The artwork Red Vessel is an intriguing part of the series. It shows an old black-and-white photo of a young woman with an embroidered red vessel underneath. Reischwitz made the red stick out to emphasise the meaning of the vessel. "The woman was from the village. But she is unknown to me. I also looked at the role of women in that society. In this tiny farming village, women couldn't break out. They didn't have too many choices. So, for me, it was also important to convey the feeling of trappedness these women experienced. I tried to imagine what kind of stories they shared. Before I start an image, I try to be in their shoes. What would they talk about? Maybe beautiful stories that lifted their spirits or stories of sadness, sorrow, and loss. This red vessel can also represent a negative aspect, disturbing their life."

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© Astrid Reischwitz | Heroic Harvest, Spin Club Tapestry

The hardship of farming and events during World War II cast a shadow over family members that can still be felt today. Telling these tales gave Reischwitz a chance for reflection and transformation. She intertwined memories and emotions into new stories. "Emotions are an integral ingredient of family pictures. Every family story is personal and emotional. The image The value of laundry pins, where I photographed a peg in my arms, is a self-portrait. It's based on a story that I heard over and over around the kitchen table. The story was that the older woman in the picture on the right cared for me when I was a baby. I heard that she pinched me with clothespins. She probably had dementia. I wanted to know how it felt. For the photo, I put the pin on my arm. Initially, it was very painful, but the longer the closed pig was in my arm, the less painful it became. It became a metaphor. Once you start looking at your prickly past, the pain will fade."
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© Astrid Reischwitz | Four Did Not Return, Spin Club Tapestry

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A part of the village's memories appeared to be hidden. One of the works of The Spinning Club has the sinister name After the Third Bomb, depicting an old farmhouse, and another artwork bears the eerie title Four Did Not Return, in which we see a group of villagers with a red stitched thread running over the photograph. The artist Astrid Reischwitz reveals a painful void in the village's past. "There is a huge void of information from my father's side. Nobody talked about his family story when I grew up. I'm filling in that void and lack of information with what I have from my mother's side. But I still have to explore it more. I scratch the surface in some images. Broken is an image from The kitchen table series, which shows this unknown past. "In my father's family, only one image survived the Nazi time because my grandparents, for political reasons, died in concentration camps. It is a scarring story that left trauma in the family and broke that family branch apart. I'm not in contact with any of my cousins from that side. It leaves traces of trauma in the family, especially in my father's family, that still can be felt today. That's something I have to explore more in the future."