Words: Niamh Gill (she/her)
Through remembrance and celebration of queer craft, love is granted to archival fragments and writings. The spirit of lovers can eclipse time and touch us, with their voices regained and memorialised.
Lesbian desire has for so long been remembered in snippets, words constructed in attempt to convey their debaucherous longing. The works of Sappho, the mother of modern lesbianism, have been anthologised through the slow accumulation of ancient scraps of parchment. A thousand years later, the posthumous discovery of Emily Dickinson’s writings, declaring the undying adoration of her lover through dozens of letters and poems. Later, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, her novel-length love letter – a feat only capable of a lesbian – and Audre Lorde’s striking Love Poem, where her fragmented prose drips with unforgettable sexual desire. Lorde’s words of physicality are mirrored in Darling Diaphanous, where archival fragments of lesbian sexuality and love physically envelop the viewers.
These words outlast their authors and reveal precious insight into the historical lesbian experience, both of simple existence and resistance. Fragile poetics that walk the lines of eroticism, intimacy, and love. Their raw emotionality reaches across the veil to sit deep inside the crevices of my body, reminding me of those who came before, the shapes they have moulded to imitate their loving. I try to mirror these women, consuming their works to continue their legacies, reading between the lines, and finding new meaning in the words which so many have poured over. I try to reenact the tried-and-true methods of loving, revolution, and care in my own relationships, writing, and crafting.
The act of loving, of trying to realise that loving into speech or writing, is something which unites so many of us. The slow act of crafting sentences which cannot be spoken aloud. These writings transcend their temporal bearings; they bring us together united by our common experience of queer life and love. However, we are not all Woolf or Lorde, memorialised by millions worldwide. Such writings are housed in Bridgeton, and at the Glasgow Women’s Library’s Lesbian Archive. The archive is one of the largest and oldest projects of historical lesbian preservation in the UK with 100 years of lesbian history since the late 90s, and this archive helps keep these women, their lives, and their desires alive.
In her exhibition, Chloe Austin explores these processes, using her delicate artworks to display fragments of lesbian desire. Like Woolf’s Orlando, Austin constructs a non-traditional love letter as an ode to the politics of lesbian women. Through engagement with archival materials, and erotohistoriography, historical narrative is created through the embodied physical experience. Traditionally feminine mediums of textile art manifest in a sanctuary of words that physically linger around the viewer.
Acts of creation and communication interrogate the careful work of making and writing. The utilisation of textiles, a medium relegated to women’s work, highlights the reverence necessary in creation of both hand-crafted objects and in the communication of love. I have never felt more loved than when I have received a hand-crafted gift – the love shown through the time and energy poured into the finished project, the skill that has been exerted and applied for me, and the care that these items provide even when the one who has crafted them is not there.
The juxtaposition of harsh sexual or political phrases against soft and gentle canvases encapsulates the layers of lesbian identity; an identity centred around celebrating, reopening, and reinvigorating queer love often sidelined or unseen in archives. The collection of fragments display our communion with each other – our shared experience of reverent love. The fragile nature of the work mirrors the vulnerability of love and of historical narrative and memory. Austin’s work parallels the beautiful AIDs memorial quilt, which will be at Glasgow’s Tramway in September, and an ever-growing memorial and archive of those who have lost their lives in the HIV/AIDs epidemic. The quilt, too, is a physical love letter honouring those forgotten as they were: queer, loved, and lover, sustained in memory and refusing to be lost or discarded. These works remind me that we are all easily forgettable, unless we adamantly refuse to be forgotten, unless we leave traces of ourselves and our community, imprint onto our culture, and talk about our loved ones.
Like writing, making and crafting prolong the act of loving. The gifts I receive or give communicate love and care which words sometimes cannot. They go alongside lines of love and desire, coming together to constitute a perfect representation of love. They are pieces of my love to carry with me, to wear, to cherish.
Through remembrance and celebration of queer craft, love is granted to archival fragments and writings. The spirit of lovers can eclipse time and touch us, with their voices regained and memorialised. Art acts as a reconstitution of our fragmented historical narrative, aiding in a rediscovery of lesbian history, resistance, and desires.
