Borderlands and Bloom Spaces: material engagement, memories, and mothers

Abstract (English)

This paper draws together theories of the body with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s concept of bloom spaces, and Sara Ahmed’s work on feminist affect, to think about how creative engagement with and through dress and textiles in everyday spaces in the home can reframe unequal, fragmented, or fraught relationships, in this case between mothers and daughters. While the body serves as a boundary or interface between the individual and the social world, enabling the construction of subject identities, bloom spaces emerge as we become aware of our condition of being in the world (worlding) at times of change, trauma, or crisis when senses are heightened, and adjustments must be made. This paper examines what we term the borderlands or edge-places of creativity in everyday life where borders blur and bloom spaces emerge as creative agencies come to the fore, shifting perspectives, making connections, and forging new relations with self and others in our social and emotional lives.

Mah Rana charts a narrative that intertwines personal reflection with theoretical insights about caring for her mother, who was living with early-stage Alzheimer’s, and rediscovering her relationship as a daughter through their experience of crafting-together. For Rana, following Foucault, all borders whether lines on a map or the protocols delineated by professional medical discourse, are knowledge regimes shaped by Cartesian, ‘Western’ patriarchal oppositions of body-mind, male-female, and art-science, which can squash the potentially recuperative possibilities of bloom spaces. Conditions such as dementia are accompanied by a shift in power dynamics and the person being cared-for becomes an object of legitimate interest to the medical profession and patriarchal control. Through the process of crafting with her mother, by knitting and stitching together, awareness of time slowed down and a bloom space opened. Reflecting on how the power relations embodied in the experiences of being a carer and being cared-for blurred, Rana became aware of how the act of crafting-together can be an embodied feminist act of care in a way that resists and pushes against the transactional or hierarchical nature of medicalised caregiving.

While Rana stitched with her mother in the living room, Hackney considers another everyday domestic space: the wardrobe, defined in the widest sense as a collection of clothes that may be housed in a dedicated piece of furniture, hung on a rail, slung over a chair, or kept in a bag or suitcase. Examining entanglements with wardrobes, through past and present lives, the piece focuses on how relationships with mothers might be manifest in, recalled, interrogated, and worked out through engagement with items of dress. Through a series of creative object (and photo) elicitation interviews, including storytelling, adaptation, repair and repurposing, Hackney unravels how the wardrobe might function as a borderland and