In an edited interview with the Estonia artist Anna-Maria Saar by British academic Jessica Hemmings, clothing repair provides an entry point to discuss the value of women's labor in Sweden, where the artist is based, and Estonia the artist's place of birth. Working on a scale more familiar to jewelers than fashion and textiles, Saar's practice is informed by material knowledge that allows the artist to darn with some of the most challenging textile fibers. The artistic and emotional risks of Saar's commitment to "invisible" work are a counterpoint to many public mending practices today and offer a warning against homogenizing an intra-European understanding of mending.

In their “Letter from the Editors: Decoloniality and Fashion” written for a special edition of this journal in 2020, Toby Slade and Angela Jansen write, “By acknowledging positionality, we aspire to operate beyond the colonial difference where every voice is knowledgeable, worthy and safe.” (811) No less than eight interviews appear in that special issue – a format contributors understandably deployed because interviews provide a space for individuals to speak for themselves rather than be spoken about, via the authority of another. The importance of dialogue continues here in this follow-up edition to the decoloniality issue in the form of an edited interview with the artist Anna-Maria Saar.

Saar undertakes the mending of clothing as a way to question the economic value of women’s skilled labor in Sweden, where the artist is based, and Estonia, the artist’s place of birth. Investing time in repairs that exist on a scale more familiar to jewelers, Saar deploys her extensive material knowledge to work with some of the most challenging textile fibers. For example, with the last spools of stretchy, snaggy stocking repair thread bought in Sweden, she repairs the foot of her own nylon tights – a place both worn away but also out of view – invisible to all but herself. The artistic and emotional risks of Saar’s commitment to “invisible” work are considerable and made all the more poignant for their refusal to be led by the optics of Instagram.

The Australian weaver Liz Williamson writes at length about the nature of darning (mending by stitching in a hole), acknowledging, “Darning is used to prolong the life of a garment out of necessity, social, economic, sentimental reasons, thrift, on principle or belief.” (2004, 1) Williamson continues, “Although invisibility is implied in the notion of darning, the very act of darning makes the darn visible.” (2004, 1) Research into communal clothing repair events offers extensive evidence of the public potential of mending (Durrani 2019), but tends to establish its contemporary purpose through a refusal to be invisible. To aspire to the invisible (even if darning does give itself away at least to the most discerning eyes and fingers), as Saar does, runs against the resurgence in recent years of interest in public, often materially overt, mending.

The Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei’s The Mending Project is one such example of mending as public art practice (Fig. 1). Poignantly explaining the project’s origins in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 bombings in New York, Mingwei recounts that his partner’s office was in the north tower of the World Trade Centre buildings. His partner missed the attack on the north tower which killed all four hundred of his colleagues and friends only because he was running a little late for work that day. Mingwei started mending that evening “the pieces of clothing that I always wanted to mend but never had the time to mend […] going through the gesture of repairing these pieces of clothing, shirts, socks, pants.” (2014) He attributes the idea of The Mending Project (2009-ongoing) to eight years later when he realized “I could do the mending not only for myself, but for strangers.” (Mingwei 2014)

Lee Mingwei’s project does not proffer literal mending. Instead, the repairs are often bunched in decorative knots with eye-catching colors. For the duration of the temporary installation, threads stretch between the public’s stitched garments and cones of thread stored on the gallery wall. In contrast, to select invisible mending today as an artistic practice as Saar undertakes is a very different political, as well as aesthetic, statement. Her work is situated within contrasting intra-European economics and politics of Estonia and Sweden, as Saar reflects from her own queer position when musing on the marketing of stocking mending threads for housewives. Saar’s repairs are enacted and unraveled to learn anew, at times darned on a scale that requires magnification for viewers to even see and, more recently, performed in public or recorded in video.

In their editorial introduction, Slade and Jansen continue: “There is an urgent need within fashion to deconstruct and unlearn present structures and rebuild them such that the pleasures of fashioning the body can be had in just, sustainable, non-exploitative, and non-discriminating ways and to rewrite the histories of fashion we rely on for our senses of heritage, dignity, and self-respect to reflect the plurality of fashion stories rather than adherence to a single universalizing modernity.” (813) The mending practice of Anna-Maria Saar offers a further voice to the “plurality of fashion stories” that deserve to be heard from within a far from homogenous Europe.

Jessica Hemmings: Can you trace when mending first appeared in your practice?

Anna-Maria Saar: In 2020, I made a commitment to myself to not buy any garments for two years. After six months everything started to break so I needed a solution to the situation I had pushed myself into. At the time I was studying for my Masters in Jewelry Art, while getting social support money from Estonia because I did not have any savings to study abroad. Mending was an action out of necessity.

A second feeling was that I just didn’t want to do anything new. I was an international student studying abroad and because of the pandemic I felt disconnected and wanted to stop time. I didn’t care about creating new jewelry. In our family we speak more through the actions of care and love than words. I just wanted to go back to Türi Estonia and sit and wait while these actions of care came to me. I remember writing to my professor: I don’t see the point right now; I think there’s so much maintenance that needs to be taken care of first. So I started to mend. In the pandemic it seemed everybody in the world started to mend. All of a sudden I felt that I found a community talking about the care of objects in a different way. It wasn’t so much about synonyms for other types of care in the world, but being part of international groups through social media.

JH: You alluded to the difference between literal and symbolic acts of mending. While your own experience started from the practical, you now invest considerable effort and skill in the repair, for example, of the bottom of a sock or stocking that is hidden from view (Fig. 2). I am reminded of the American artist Sheila Hicks who received a gift of socks darned by Carmelite nuns (Fig. 3). Hicks’ explains that because the nuns wore wooden clogs the soles of their linen socks wore out long before the heel area (Stritzler-Levine 2006, 194).

A-MS: The work I exhibited in Domkyrkan in Gothenburg in late 2021 was the 7th or 8th attempt to re-knit the heel of a beige woolen sock. Getting the work to the right state meant carefully relearning the exact way, with the same exact amount of stitches, as my grandmother had knitted the original. It also is a great example how a big amount of my work will never be seen, because it is often unraveled and reworked. In my eyes repair is unforgiving: I do not have much choice or possibility to pretend that I planned it this or that way. The items I fix are readymade and have their own properties. When the material is stretchy I need to offer a repair that also stretches. If I go against the material’s will it breaks again, sooner, due to the irritation of the new material I have created.

In order to learn from my work I sometimes fix holes over and over again by filling and unravelling them. Learning to repair has reminded me to be soft in my body: to give direction to the tools and materials but not using power, to work with the material and not against it. This is the same principle Richard Sennett refers to in his book Together: “Using minimum force is tied to befriending one’s tools” (Sennett 2013, 210).

I often feel that the types of crafts like repair, knitting and crochet have a tendency to never leave their makers, which means that the makers never rest. It is the same the other way around, the makers never leave their work as it will be taken up in our free time. If it is not treated as a work, how can it be considered or valued as work? My current geographical location in Sweden is already changing the value, worth and meaning of my work. It is sometimes hard to put a price on my time and skills in case I position myself as a tailor rather than an artist. Does the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of a given work effect the value of my time? I do exactly the same job: I repair the holes in garments with the same care and attention. The meaning and value of the repair action depends, in my view, on where it finds its context.

JH: I understand the repair thread you use for stockings is finite. It comes from earlier generations and a different attitude towards material culture. Practically, I imagine the production of the thread has ceased?

A-MS: The first time I ever even noticed a paper with a tiny bit of thread wrapped around it was in a Swedish secondhand shop. Ninety-nine percent of all of my collected repair threads have been bought from secondhand shops. The mending culture was so wide. The name on some of the tags led me to the Dutch company Maasgaren by Vroon & Dreesmann. Google image search showed me a picture of a set of yarns by the same company and the size, colors and the way they are rolled are too similar to be mistaken. The box has the phrase “De Practische Huisvrouw” or “the practical housewife”. The neatly designed labels of repair threads and craft tools from countries with a more common concept of housewives struck me – especially from queer perspective.

I think in Estonia repairs used the materials we already had. The repair threads I have bought in Sweden are almost always packed very neatly, decorated with images suggesting marketing to housewives. Sometimes the factories’ pictures are on the other side of the paper. As far as I know, in Estonian culture there weren’t housewives. You were the housewife next to the fact that you first went to work.

Here in Gothenburg the Mölnlycke AB Textile Factory manufactured sewing threads until 1987. I can buy needles, tools and threads all secondhand. There is a sense of a kind of culture that, as a lady, you would have known how to mend, but not with random materials. Certain types of thread for certain items were produced for mending. I found the stocking threads by accident. Several were in one package, different kinds of beige, brown and ugly colors. I remember these stockings in my childhood, and my grandmother’s shelf. The thread is stretchy and acts in the same way as unraveled stockings.

JH: The material you work with is one of the most materially difficult things you could select. You are darning an existing fabric that has give-and-take in it, and you are working on a minute scale. Your repair is relatively difficult for our eyes to even notice. If this started as a type of commentary on labor that is unnoticed or invisible, your own labor seems to erase itself?

A-MS: To repair a hole in tights or a sweater works the same way, the scale is just different. I love that the mend is almost invisible. I talk about the labor and the slow actions of my work, but I try to talk about them with big words and a loud enough voice. Nobody is ever really willing to pay for this labor. When viewing something so tiny my work disappears and people start to read it as the already existing pattern (Figs. 4 & 5). That has made me develop my own artistry much more because I need to understand how I communicate my presence. The performance side started in order to have something that would make itself, that I didn’t need to put any money into. I think mending filled a need to hold on to something; I need to feel myself and my body in one moment.

JH: You chose a haberdashery shop as the venue for Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA) Extended (Fig. 6). On one level, choosing this setting to sit and mend is another act of erasure – making yourself as invisible as the incredible detail and beauty of what you mend.

A-MS: There is this lucky part about GIBCA Extended: I was free to choose the venue. I only had the store Knapp-Carlsson in my mind. They have lovely windows with narrow windowsills. They opened in 1910 and the current location on Kyrkogatan is only their second address in Gothenburg. They still sell buttons and threads from the fifties and sixties. They also have old repair threads. There are untouched materials and that is so like the knowledgeable people working there, most likely from slöjd education (see Solomon 1891/2010).

But practically, I couldn’t physically get into the windowsill. It was too narrow and my hips wouldn’t turn there. That made me question why I wanted the window and this shop? There is this aspect of unnoticed work, maybe done in living rooms in the evenings, when the children and men are sleeping. What happens with the same work when it becomes as public as women’s bodies sometimes seen in the windows of Amsterdam, or elsewhere? That was a trigger for me.

Then I was offered a place inside the store instead and I’m glad I took it because to sit with the public created another performative element. The performance lasted for three working days from the store opening until the store closing. I took pauses once in a while, not speaking. I bought a secondhand dress and tried to look as if I belonged to the store.

We built a tiny L-shaped stage. Entering the store from one side you couldn’t see me, I’m just there in-between the button shelves. The stage was imitating the interior of the store. I was often understood as one of the workers and received questions: do you have this one? Where do I get the queuing number? I didn’t even raise my eyes. How do you read a body sitting quietly doing something laborious in a craft store?

A-MS: I had first hoped to work on a pair of tights, but I realized I have mostly worked with them through a magnifying glass. I didn’t want to get too many elements into the performance because the importance is not me as a machine. The performance is me as simple as it can get, only my eyesight and one ordinary lamp. Whenever I work on the tights I need to relearn the pattern. I still make mistakes because it is stretchy material knit in stretchy thread. There isn’t too much possibility to take back. So I switched to a polycotton sock repaired with a cotton thread that I paired with pure nylon thread – a bigger scale and much easier to read.

I am interested in sustainable working methods and positions. Sometimes it takes the perfect height chair with a back rest or a light a certain distance from my head. It also means that I like to move around. But for the performance I tried to be stiff and this was what was tiring for the body. After the first day I bought a smaller light bulb because I had the feeling that people were scared away from the light shining from the lampshade. I wanted to create this inviting and cozy feeling like a living room, but that is not particularly good for doing craft over a long time. I was showing myself like a stiff figure in paintings or drawings. In those illustrations of working women I always feel that they don’t have breaks. They don’t say I’m tired now, I’m stretching. So neither did I.

Later, in 2023 for a four person exhibition in Helsinki at Vapaan Taiteen Tila called “That Being Said” I exhibited a video of me mending the same sock that I also used for the Gothenburg performance. The video [How to Describe Mending a Sock] shows me stitch-by-stitch imitating the knitted materials (Fig. 7). Two descriptive translations for the visually impaired in English and Estonian are part of the video. The script is something already happening on the screen, sometimes a tiny bit delayed. It is almost like I’m pretending to stitch but it is this rhythmical reading describing the movement of the needle and thread. This repetitive work is not tiring because I was stitching as fast as I could. How do I make more people understand the tempo of the work; what is the actual labor?

[…]

JH: Robyn Healy aligns the breakdown of textiles in the archive with the museum’s inability to ultimately fix or control history: “The radical and irreversible changes that occur through decay propose a framework to consider design and the culture of dress. The continuing breakdown creates a disorder that cannot be contained – one that symbolically challenges the authority of the museum itself.” (Healy 2008, 258) I understand you have recently started archival research?

A-MS: This January, in the archive of the Estonian National Museum, I looked for examples of repaired textiles (Fig. 8). I was interested in how the repairers were described. Are they described at all? Does it matter who did it? In the Estonian National Museum the older collecting books did not have information about who made the item. The books record who sold the item to the museum or who donated it. Estonia has been an occupied, and reoccupied, country. This has also meant that at some points the museum collections have been kept in other safe spaces away from war.

There were examples of socks and mittens from 1904. In conversation with the Estonian ethnologist and curator Reet Piiri I learnt that the socks and mittens were in perfect condition when packed away. Then they were moved around Estonia, hidden. When the boxes were brought back to new rooms of the museum and unpacked it was found that soldiers, rats and moths had gone through the boxes. Now these items needed repair. Sometimes it is hard to track down if the repair has been done by the owner, or by the restorer. In this museum the other museum workers were saying that the restorers work was so perfect that you can’t really see what she has done.

JH: It sounds like a search for invisible histories of care. Are you compelled to keep mending – leaving a legacy that others’ can hardly see?

A-MS: I do feel something runs through our female family side: the need of being needed by others. I don’t want to feel useless. What kind of use am I willing to give back to the world? I have barely ever made any money with my work. I have exhibited quite a lot but that is pretty much it. I teach sometimes. It is a way of being seen. I enjoy being asked: how does it work? I want to help figure out things.

But I’m just so bored of garments. I’m not doing this performance so I can buy myself new things. My things are still becoming monsters of combinations. Even if I’m trying to match the thread color perfectly with my jeans, they will still have huge holes, the jeans especially. Then I patch it up with 100% virgin wool, some perfect Italian fabric, because it is visually similar to the rough jean.

With my body shape, I feel myself in general an ugly person. If I try to go to an ordinary store and find something that is so-called my size, fashion designers haven’t figured out that I do have hips, or they really don’t think about the possibility of the bodies they are fitting. They design for a certain body that hasn’t often fully developed yet. Now I am again back in the men’s section. Why are women’s garments so often made of worse materials than men’s garments? I want my things to last.

When I am speaking in Estonian, I go directly to the point. The same way I use my language, is how I use my fabrics, or materials. As a Republic, Estonia is younger than I am. I am so lucky to have lived through some different views and that makes it a tiny bit easier to have my own voice.

JH: There is a moralizing tone around some repair initiatives, as though this is the new bandwagon everyone must join. But there remain many contexts where cultures of repair and reuse never went away. For example, Sophie Tendai Christiaens in Design Materials and Making for Social Change writes about local circular sourcing and regenerative design used by fashion designers in Zimbabwe: “many designers on the [African] continent, particularly in the fashion industry, have inherited, developed, and deployed circular practices for years.” (2022, 181) Without suggesting that economic and political problems are positive, it seems important to resist generalizations about how mending is understood.

A-MS: I think that is why it is sometimes easier for me to talk about the repair of things in Sweden. I have heard conversationally that during Estonia’s latest occupation at the beginning of 1990s there was at least one studio in Tallinn’s old town where women were picking up the stitches of unraveled stockings, repairing them for an hourly pay. I don’t know the amount of hourly pay and I’m interested. What is the payment of women’s work? In Estonia these realities are so recent. Maybe that is why my mending practice is sometimes not celebrated in Estonia.

JH: thank you.

References

Christiaens, Sophie Tendai. 2023. “Decolonizing Design Perspectives: steps towards more inclusive circular Economies”. Rebecca Earley and Rosie Hornbuckle (eds.) Design Materials and Making for Social Change: From Materials We Explore to Materials We Wear, pp. 178–196.

Durrani, Marium. 2019. “Through the Threaded Needle: A multi-sited ethnography on the sociomateriality of garment mending practices”. Helsinki: Aalto University Schools of Arts, Design and Architecture.

Healy, Robyn. 2008. “The Parody of the Motley Cadaver: Displaying the Funeral of Fashion” The Design Journal, volume 11, issue 3, pp. 255–268.

Mingwei, Lee. 2014. “Lee Mingwei and His Relations” Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, filmed by Araki Takahisa.

Salomon, Otto. 1891/2010. “‘Introductory Remarks’, from The Teacher’s Handbook of Slojd”. The Craft Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. pp. 11–15.

Sennett, Richard. 2013. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Slade, Toby and M. Angela Jansen. 2020. “Letter from the Editors: Decoloniality and Fashion” Fashion Theory, 24:6, pp. 809–814.

Stritzler-Levine, Nina (ed.). 2006. Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Williamson, Liz. 2004. “Darning…” Textiles Society of America Conference. In Grace Cochrane, 2008. “Darning: Visible/Invisible” Liz Williamson: Textiles. Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft.