Looking Directly at Woven Coverlets
Brian Wallace, Curator, Dorsky Museum
I very clearly recall my first encounter with woven coverlets: it was an overwhelming
experience. On the morning of March 5th, 2009, several Historic Huguenot Street staff
and I gathered around a brightly lit table at one end of a dark room and examined some
two dozen coverlets over the course of several hours. A coverlet is a large, heavy, and
surprisingly—to this non-expert—robust object, and to “examine” a coverlet is a
physical, I daresay intimate act: each coverlet is carried from storage, removed from its
container, and, with a two-person choreography that respects conservation protocols
and also hearkens back to the coverlet’s original function as a bedcovering, unwrapped
and unfolded out, and out, and out to its full size, and then, after viewing, carefully but
purposefully turned over to reveal the negative-image reverse side.
Coverlets are so large, and so detailed, that I found myself—and observed my colleagues—
moving in close to look at the pattern components and even at the over-and-under of the
weave structures of each coverlet, and then backing away from the coverlet and moving
around it—and trading vantage points—in order to better see the conceptual dynamism and
the optical complexity of the coverlet’s design elements. Coverlets, I realized over the course of
this initial experience, are simultaneously images and things: the very substance of a woven
coverlet is the design of its interlocked threads, and the design or patterning of a woven
coverlet literally makes the coverlet a physically coherent object. A strikingly clear message
about the embodied nature of vision—a subject of much recent and current debate in art and
aesthetics—was being semaphored to me from the early nineteenth century.
Two other surprisingly contemporary subjects came to my mind as the coverlets were handled,
shared, compared, and discussed by the group in that room. First, the coverlets are binary: like
a digital image, each coverlet’s marks, lines, patterns, and images—even seeming gradations,
and even occasional mistakes—are built up from long strings of simple choices: the thread will
go over or it will go under another thread, that spot on the coverlet will appear light or dark,
and so on. Great complexity arises from repeated simple choices. This procedural method both
requires and rewards careful planning and, also, intuitive leaps. In the social/historical realm,
fascinating discoveries about the entrepreneurial nature of the coverlet industry have been and
will continue to be made. In the visual/cultural realm, this procedural method invites short
cuts—we might also call them “creative strategies” or a “visual lexicon”—such as the partial or
complete repetition of pattern elements, the flipping, reversal, and rotation of pattern
elements, and even the borrowing and trading of pattern elements between and among
coverlet workshops, designers, and customers. The simple negative/positive (dark/light) switch
between coverlet front and back has a viscerally powerful optical effect on me and—judging
from spontaneous reactions and unsolicited comments—on others. The
copy/cut/paste/paste/paste relationship of border patterns and central figures in certain
geometric coverlets reminds me of a d.j. sampling and repeating a beat to construct a new
rhythm—and the designs of the corners of certain coverlets, made up from combined
sampled/repeated patterns, raise the mathematical and visual complexity of these constructed
patterns to a new level. And, in a different vein, the forward-and-backward texts and the
mirrored design elements (especially the representational, naturalistic ones) suggest a slippage
between image and content that, as procedural, print, collage, and photographic techniques
proliferate throughout the nineteenth century, will become a problem, and an opportunity, for
later image- and object-makers to address and exploit.
The other topics these coverlets raise—for earlier critics and for us, today—is related to the
manner in which they were developed, manufactured, marketed, and consumed. The
nineteenth century industrialization of heretofore handmade objects created something of an
aesthetic crisis: long-established constraints upon ornament and decoration—and the
traditional accounts of the origins of decorative elements in materials and techniques—were
overrun by waves of goods and successions of styles. The coverlets in this exhibition reveal a
hard-to-pin-down but distinct-in-hindsight shift from designs that arose out of manipulations of
materials and processes to designs that reflected the expressivity of the maker and the desires
of the consumer. Whether or not the coverlet designers and their customers—who, like today’s
point-and-click consumers of option-laden status goods, were important participants in the
design process in many cases—intended to, they created object/images that pose fascinating
questions about communal and individual taste and creativity.
