Thread as Thought: Fiber, Community, and the Aesthetics of Care

To stitch is to mark time. To move with it, not capture it. To follow its rhythm through the hum of conversation, the rustle of fabric, the quiet sound of care. In Threaded Together: A Stitch Social Experiment, on view at Waterfall Arts from October 4 to November 21, 2025, seventeen artists invite us into this rhythm of attention. Each thread traces a story of repair, relation, and belonging.

What began in early 2023 as Stitch Social, a twice-monthly gathering of fiber artists, has become one of Waterfall Arts’ most vibrant threads of community. Program Director Amy Tingle, who co-founded the group following the 2022 exhibition Radical Acts with Shannon Downey, describes it as “about much more than stitches. It’s about community care, storytelling, and creating space for voices that are often quieted.” That quiet, as this exhibition makes clear, is an invitation, not an absence.

The Radical Ordinary

Fiber art has long lived in the margins of art history, categorized as “craft,” “women’s work,” or “decorative.” Yet it is precisely in its ordinariness that its power resides. Each act of sewing, mending, or knitting is a negotiation between function and form, between the everyday and the aesthetic.

Philosopher Yuriko Saito calls this the aesthetics of everyday life—a recognition that beauty and meaning are not reserved for rarefied spaces but are constantly enacted in the gestures that sustain us (Saito 2007, 4). A pot simmering on the stove, a well-swept floor, a neatly folded quilt: these are not trivial. They are the architecture of care.

In this sense, the works in Threaded Together occupy a dual space: they are both artwork and artifact, both contemporary expression and archival memory. Their tactility demands a kind of looking that is also feeling, a slow encounter that mirrors the slow labor of their making.

“For centuries,” Saito writes, “the aesthetic has been located in objects of admiration rather than in acts of attention” (Saito 2007, 3).

Fiber reverses that hierarchy. Its very softness resists monumentality, its pliability undermines permanence. To thread a needle is to engage in philosophy through the hand.

Women’s Work and the Politics of Touch

The label women’s work has often served to domesticate and diminish, yet within it lies a history of resistance and survival. The repetitive gestures of sewing, darning, or weaving, often dismissed as domestic, encode knowledge systems as complex as any engineering. They form what feminist scholar Rozsika Parker called “the subversive stitch” (Parker 1984, 5).

The artists of Stitch Social bring this lineage into the present. Some works lean into the functional, such as blankets, garments, vessels, while others push fiber into the sculptural and conceptual. But all share a tactile intelligence, a way of thinking through making. Each thread becomes a record of embodied time, each knot a moment of choice.

In an age dominated by speed, automation, and distraction, this deliberate slowness becomes radical. It gestures toward sustainability not only in materials but in ways of being; being with one another, with ourselves, with the world.

Threaded Cosmologies: Bilum and the Aesthetics of Connection

Across the globe, acts of fiber-making have long served as languages of connection. In Papua New Guinea, women weave bilum—looped bags made from plant fibers—that carry not just food or goods but kinship and identity. The bilum is both an object and an event: made in communal circles, it symbolizes birth, exchange, and care.

Anthropologist Maureen MacKenzie describes the bilum as an extension of the body; flexible, open, generative. Its looped construction, without beginning or end, reflects an ontology of continuity (MacKenzie 1991, 57). To make a bilum is to make community.

While the artists of Stitch Social work in a different geography and tradition, their ethos resonates. Like the bilum, their textiles embody relationships: between maker and material, between individual and collective. Both practices arise from what anthropologist Alfred Gell called “art as agency,” art not as static form but as active relation (Gell 1998, 6).

The parallel here is not to equate but to illuminate. Across cultures, the act of weaving is both aesthetic and ethical, a practice of attention, connection, and care.

The Industry of Intimacy

In contemporary culture, fiber occupies a paradoxical space. Once dismissed as craft, it now fuels global creative economies, from slow fashion and Etsy marketplaces to textile-based social practice. Yet even within this industry, the gendered labor behind it remains undervalued.

Threaded Together offers an alternative model, what we might call the industry of intimacy. At Waterfall Arts, art-making is not transactional but relational. Materials circulate, skills are shared, meals are potluck. The “value” produced is not measured in sales but in solidarity.

This is not to romanticize; it is to recognize a micro-economy of meaning that challenges the extractive logic of mainstream art markets. In this space, slowness is not inefficiency; it is integrity.

Toward a Philosophy of Thread

At its core, Threaded Together asks us to reconsider what counts as art, labor, and beauty. It reasserts the social as aesthetic, the everyday as profound. The exhibition’s subtitle—A Stitch Social Experiment—is apt: each meeting, each shared meal, each strand of yarn is an experiment in belonging.

Waterfall Arts’ mission to create community in harmony with nature through the transformative power of the arts finds tactile expression here. These works are not just made at Waterfall Arts; they make Waterfall Arts. They bind its people, its history, its future.

Perhaps philosophy begins not in abstraction but in the hand—the hand that threads, ties, and offers.

To make is to think. To think is to connect. To connect is to care.

Threaded Together: A Stitch Social Experiment is on view through November 21, 2025 in the Waterfall Arts Clifford Gallery. Learn more here.

Bibliography

Adamson, Glenn. Thinking Through Craft. Berg Publishers, 2007.

Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford University Press, 1998.

MacKenzie, Maureen. Androgynous Objects: String Bags and Gender in Central New Guinea. Routledge, 1991.

Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. Women’s Press, 1984.

Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2007.Sartwell, Crispin. The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions. State University of New York Press, 1995.