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) Hardcover, 30 x 24 cm
128 pages, 78 color illustrations

Astrid Reischwitz follows a path through the lives of her ancestors, their layout of a perfect pattern and the mistakes they made.

In Spin Club Stories, Astrid Reischwitz explores personal and cul- tural 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 tradi- tion of storytelling into a visual journey. Her own embroidered designs are partial representations of her ancestral linens, em- phasizing 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.

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 com- pelling as the front. The end result is a complex web of colorful threads that bind together elements of both old and new, beauti- fully 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.

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 hard- ships 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.

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 machinemade products jute and cotton had displaced linen on the market. At the same time, traditional rural practices such as spinning, wearing tradi- tional costumes, and embroidering festive ornamental towels de- clined in the second half of the nineteenth century, or were main- tained 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 contem- porary witnesses, one such “spin club” (Spinneklump) existed in Bortfeld until the twentieth century.