In the book 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, emphasising 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.

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From the text Spin Club Stories by Astrid Reischwitz:

I remember hiding beneath my grandmother’s beautifully adorned coffee table as a child. I can still hear the lilt of voices as she and the women in her Spinneklump, chatted above me in the local Plattdeutsch dialect. In our small farming village of Bortfeld in Lower Saxony, Germany, small groups of women used to meet regularly to spin wool, knit clothes, and embroider fabrics for the home, just like the generations of women before them. The hardships of farming and events of World War II cast a shadow over the villagers that can still be felt today. As they stitched, these women shared personal stories, offering moral support and advice which became a social glue joining many of them together over the duration of their lives. In a tiny village so bound by tradition, the spin club became a way to keep customs alive, until eventually, they shared anecdotes over coffee and cake instead of needlework. My work transforms this tradition of storytelling into a visual journey.

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From the preface by Karen E. Haas:

It is often noted that the words text and textile share the same etymological roots, from the Latin texere, meaning to weave. We still employ phrases like “spinning a yarn,” “weaving a tale,” or “embroidering the truth” when narrating a story. Having left Ger- many as a young woman, Reischwitz is now an American citizen with a daughter of her own. Reischwitz introduces her personal biography into her most recent work by way of stitches that are literally sutured into her paper prints, her work speaks viscerally to the fragmentation and sense of loss she faces in living so far from her home country. Whether copying a precise, decorative pattern from family linens, or embellishing traditional designs such as the tree of life or the double eagle, the artist makes no ef- fort to hide any mistakes made in her own hand embroidery. The backs of her prints, each slightly different from the next and replete with wayward knots and stray tangles, are often as visually compelling as the front. The end result is a complex web of colourful threads that bind together elements of both old and new, beautifully evoking the ebb and flow of human memory. In her prints, Reischwitz deconstructs the artificial hierarchies between craft and fine art by emphasizing the handmade and personal, remind- ing us of the power of creativity in all its forms; not only as a tool to tell our stories, but to help mend our pain as well.

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From the text Idealization and Industrialization – Village Life in the Braunschweig Region around 1900 by Anika Kreft:

The industrialization of the Braunschweig region, a process which accelerated during the late nineteenth century, was characterized by a time of agricultural prosperity.(...) The machine-made products jute and cotton had displaced linen on the market. At the same time, traditional rural practices such as spinning, wearing traditional costumes, and embroidering festive ornamental towels declined in the second half of the nineteenth century, or were maintained only by older villagers. The institution of meeting in so-called “spinning rooms” persisted. At the women’s gatherings, however, communicative exchange and other handicrafts besides spinning became increasingly important. According to contemporary witnesses, one such “spin club” (Spinneklump) existed in Bortfeld until the twentieth century.

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About Astrid Reischwitz's work: I think that the artist’s way of presentation is brilliant, where people’s lives of the present and old days in a small village are combined through the images of needlework of women. The artist adds a quality of handmade craft to her photographs which vividly shows the movements and acts of the women in the community. The work sheds light on the history of the village women which have been easily forgotten in the official record.

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New Release Kehrer Verlag

Astrid Reischwitz Spin Club Stories

A Visual Journey Through Tradition, Memory and Identity

Texts by Karen E. Haas, Anika Kreft, Astrid Reischwitz Designed by Kehrer Design (Claudia Eder)

Half-cloth hardcover, 30 x 24 cm

128 pages, 78 color illustrations English, German

ISBN 978-3-96900-093-9

Euro 44,00 / US$ 54.00

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