Sewing Proust: Patchwork as Critical Practice

Abstract

This article offers a case study of textile practice as critical praxis. I describe my own work, somewhat provocatively, as “intellectual sewing” conducted in the manner of a critique. My methodology supports the agenda for integration of theory into practice, arriving at an interdisciplinary approach that promotes mutuality of theory with practice as a working model. In 2008 I began to cut up all seven volumes of Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu and to hand stitch 3,000 pages of print into patchwork. This task is ongoing. Entitled The Time I'm Taking, the piece belongs to an existing set of paper patchworks known collectively as Critical Cloth. Overall, the aim is to employ needlework, very particularly, needlework, to critique consumer and late capitalist culture. The Time I'm Taking cogitates through practice, exploring the nature and experience of time at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That is to say, what might it mean to take apart then stitch together Proust's Modernist text 100 years after its production? How does a literary figuring of time lie with stitching through time? A commitment to “take my time” to read and sew Proust may seem “a critical antidote to our fast-moving, profit-driven world,” but it also rebuts that world, calling its values into question. In this respect, engaging with practice as “critical antidote” might well qualify that practice to be an agent of well-being.

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