selvedges: janis jeffries, writings and artworks since 1980
If there is any place to begin Janis Jefferies selvedges it is in anticipation-book closed on your lap, savoring the desire to read pages as you open them. The book, itself spiral bound, wants to be opened and for its pages to be turned backwards and forwards. Its weight is light and familiar in the hand, like a journal carried around in one's bag for recording stolen moments, questions, thoughts and ideas. The format of the journal seems very appropriate for a collection of Jefferies's essays about her own and others' contemporary tex1ile practices. Jefferies writing challenges the closure pre-eminent among art history texts, that seek to espouse truths and define boundaries between artistic genres. selvedges' fragmented parts, written over a period of fifteen years, refuse to establish any clear cut, self-contained narrative about textiles. Instead, the writing in this collection searches out and around itself to find a rhythm and measure for those elements of textile practice that are not swaddling and suffocating but flexible and open. The capacity of an object or texture to suggest the presence of something absent, a veil-like characteristic which enables textiles to speak most fully of an otherness before themselves. Jefferies has the capacity to retrieve these aspects of her own and others' contemporary textile practice within her writing. But how? There is what Sarat Maharaj in his forward describes as an 'unscriptedness' to the way Jefferies writes and makes sense of her subjects. A capacity to mobilise what is otherwise fairly dense theory and language to retrieve a sense of being passionately and intimately engaged with her subject as an ongoing, developing, entity. Importantly, the reader is encouraged to share this engagement