Musing about differences

A quite random set of thought fragments I’ve been jotting down about ‘differences’, which is the current prompt in the No Rules Textile Society. It seems very timely to think about the multi-faceted meanings of difference as the powers seek to erode and erase nuance and ambiguity in favour of simplistic binary divisions. Any unattributed quotes are my own.

• different directions - warp and weft, the perpendicular relationship between them may be stretched to an extreme but remains fundamental to the notion of weaving

• black and white
  orange and purple and all the other complementary pairs of colours

• male and female, masculine and feminine, and everything in between

• there is contrast and there is gradation. Diversity may be polarised and opposed, or celebrated and explored.

• is difference always at the edges of a continuum?

• reconciling differences; inclusions; connections; bring disparate things together to form something new and interdependent

• merging differences, "margins, edges, intersections, the borderlands between art and craft, clarity and confusion, word and flesh, strength and weakness, precious and mundane, sure and doubtful, hedgerows, waysides, places that join and divide, thin places"

• wool and silk/linen/cotton

• resistance and resist techniques

• materials where differences work together to create strength by combining two structures, each of which on its own is weak. Examples include bone and fibreglass. Suggested by Alan Dix.

• exclusion and inclusion, seed and fruit, barren and fertile, invisible and visible,
  rough and delicate, dead and alive, rich and poor, soft and hard, dark and light,
  stitch and rip, mend and damage, seedtime and harvest, peace and war,
  round and square, wide and narrow, land and sea, day and night, love and hate,
  sound and silence, sweet and sour, asleep and awake

• "… the hall is a threshold, an in-between of two other worlds: interior versus exterior, private versus public, and intimate versus foreign. As a marginal zone, the hall does not belong to either of these categories but plays a spatial role in both of them." and "The hall is not a univocal space: it is a space where the reversal between interior and exterior, private and public, and opening and closing are always possible. Consequently, this space holds a variety of behaviors and actions that tend subtly to a transition, a change of status." Céline Rosselin. ‘The Ins and Outs of the Hall’, in At Home - An Anthropology of Domestic Space, Irene Cieraad

• textiles in the form of clothing form a threshold between interior and exterior, both physically and semantically, the private inner surface that touches the skin in an intimate day-long caress, and the public outer surface that both protects us from and presents us to the 'other'

• "One step over the threshold that divided her small rag rug, with its quiet, homely blues and grays, from that pagan abandon of golds and greens and red outside, and her life here was over." Diana Gabaldon, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

• the dangers of falling asleep beneath a grafted orchard tree, how it's a place that is 'not quite nature, not quite culture', a liminal threshold where you can fall through worlds, from Carolyne Larrington and Fay Hield, talking about Orfeo and Heurodis and the Fairy King in the Modern Fairies podcast series

• "subtle variations of colour and texture"

• resonant synonyms: diversity, distinction, divergence, variance, change, otherness, deviance, inequality, incongruity, dissent, nonconformity

• resonant antonyms: resemblance, community, analogy, correspondence