The Needle as Medium: Using Embroidery to Speak to Ghosts

Christine Rogers

doi:10.18432/ari29407

The Needle as Medium: Using Embroidery to Speak to Ghosts

Christine Rogers

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Abstract

As an adoptee, I am haunted by what Lifton (2009) calls the Ghost Kingdom, a place filled with the spectres of the ancestors I have been disconnected from. Derrida (1993), with his notion of hauntology, tells us that we must learn to speak to ghosts, and that by doing so we will learn to live. I am on a journey to speak to the ancestors of my birth father who were Ngāi Tahu (Māori), and through this, to make meaning in my present and future (Carsten, 2000). I am using embroidery as a medium to speak to, and with, my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth (Fitzpatrick & Bell, 2016), working in a craft vernacular that would have been deeply familiar to her. This paper will discuss how the methodology of autoethnography, informed by adoption scholarship and feminist studies of craft, has led me to stitch work that engages with craft tradition, and speaks to loss, identity and belonging.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	127–152
Journal	Art Research International
Volume	4
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29407
Publication status	Published - 27 Feb 2019
Externally published	Yes

Keywords

autoethnography
hauntology
embroidery
adoption
Maori

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10.18432/ari29407Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

The Needle as Medium: Using Embroidery to Speak to Ghosts
Copyright 2021 the authors. This is an open access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits distribution and reproduction for non-commercial purposes, provided the author and source are cited.
Final published version, 10.7 MBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

Cite this

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abstract = "As an adoptee, I am haunted by what Lifton (2009) calls the Ghost Kingdom, a place filled with the spectres of the ancestors I have been disconnected from. Derrida (1993), with his notion of hauntology, tells us that we must learn to speak to ghosts, and that by doing so we will learn to live. I am on a journey to speak to the ancestors of my birth father who were Ngāi Tahu (Māori), and through this, to make meaning in my present and future (Carsten, 2000). I am using embroidery as a medium to speak to, and with, my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth (Fitzpatrick & Bell, 2016), working in a craft vernacular that would have been deeply familiar to her. This paper will discuss how the methodology of autoethnography, informed by adoption scholarship and feminist studies of craft, has led me to stitch work that engages with craft tradition, and speaks to loss, identity and belonging. ",

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The Needle as Medium: Using Embroidery to Speak to Ghosts

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Keywords

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