2023-07-06 11:58:59
Arachne. 2023. (Diptych) embroidery, ink and nets / print on canvas, 92 x 146 cm.
KNIT WOMAN
Anthony Cervera
Cultural manager and independent curator
“You will live, insolent Arachne, always in this suspended form;
such will be your punishment for all posterity.”
the metamorphoses
Publio Ovid (8th AD)
The woman has found herself woven into her own circumstances marked by a patriarchal society that to this day we have not overcome. This fabric has been created under the mandate and influence of men, where each stitch has been trapping, entangling and confining women in areas lacking representation and power: housework, family care, procreation and the education of the new generations, where the sexual division has not been eradicated. The house, that place of refuge and protection, is at the same time a habitat of confinement and condemnation.
In the myth of Arachne we can find a critical and political woman who weaves and embroiders with great skill, or as Ovid points out, a conceited and impetuous woman who offends Minerva (Athena in Ancient Greece), goddess of crafts, of wisdom. and of war, which punishes her for her subversive stitches to weave for all eternity, giving her the shape of a spider.
at the exhibition Woven Woman the creator Ana DMatos presents her works from the 90s to the present, where we highlight the works produced in honor of the netters of La Vila, sewing fishing nets on their canvases. These networks will serve to delve into classical mythology, like Arachne and Medusa, whose punishments turn them into monsters. Ana is going to propose to cut that network, to point out that it was that patriarchy that made a monster of women. The net is undone to let escape when being trapped in a myth that disciplines and strangles women.
Trilogy: Penelope, Cassandra and Medusa (2023), Embroidery and collage / print on fabric, 100 x 73 cm. cu
The artist takes the anthropologist Ana Baldó’s manuscript “La couture de las artes marítimas” as a reference, to value the ethnography of Villajoyosa, “The productive process of fishing gear structured on the basis of a sexual division of labor that subjected to the networks to work under the domestic system. This system allowed women to enter the labor market, contributing their labor to the sector without abandoning reproductive and care work from the domestic sphere, which meant assuming an invisible and unrecognized double workload”.
Although we might think that it only claims weaving as art, as Louise Bourgeois, Ann Hamilton or Donna Henes did previously; DMatos, she also proposes a syncretism between the different arts, since we find in her works the well-known disciplines of the great masters along with other feminized techniques, giving them the same value. She, with her stitch, revolutionizes the pillars of the art world formed from a masculine vision, placing the role of women in contemporary society at the center of her discourse. In the words of the artist “Patriarchy is a constant in our culture and conditions our gaze. Our identity has been restricted from even before we were born, continues in childhood, and throughout our lives. I do not believe in cultural identity, but in the value of culture as a creative, dynamic process that provokes emotions, thoughts and, as a consequence, changes. In my work there is always this break with the given patterns”.
Ana DMatos, Woven Woman, ART-KOS Space, Vila Joiosa, Alicante. From July 7 to September 30, 2023.
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