Coronavirus Embroideries: Heartworks Story Project

Coronavirus Embroideries

The Heartworks Stories project

Cape Town

The Heartworks Stitching Club

Overview: A series of embroideries, primarily by local and migrant women, in Cape Town, South Africa, depicting the impact of the Covid-19 Lockdown on their communities 

Pamela Allara: On June 8, 2020, American sociologist and photographer Jennifer Natalie Fish, whose research focuses on women’s labor in informal economies, and who chairs the Women’s Studies department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, published a short notice on her website about a group of embroideries depicting the coronavirus pandemic being created by the Heartworks Stitching Club in Cape Town, South Africa. The Stitching Club is based at the Heartworks crafts shop at the Old Biscuit Mill, but the 25 migrant and local women involved work from home. Heartworks was founded Margaret Woermann in 2000 in order to support local crafts women and men; Woermann currently purchases craft from many more crafters than just those women. Although Heartworks’ two shops offer a wide range of crafts objects, from refrigerator magnets to animal sculptures, its best-known products, embroidered teddy bears and hearts, are sold throughout South Africa and provide the women with sustainable income. The COVID-19 cloths are the most recent of its products.

Embroidery Collectives (Historical Background: Beginning in the 1980s, embroidery collectives were established in rural, impoverished areas to provide women and their families with desperately needed income. Several of the obstacles to the success of these projects included lack of contact with buyers as well as the challenge of arriving at ‘saleable’ subject matter. Whatever the initial challenges, a number of the collectives have thrived; for example, embroidered cloths, including wall hangings and table cloths, by the Kaross Workers and the Mapula group, sell widely to both locals and tourists in craft shops in Johannesburg and Cape Town. The women in these established collectives produce standard motifs such as South African wildlife, but the products avoid becoming repetitive as each individual is encouraged to represent the animals, or other motifs, such as domestic scenes, as she sees them. In addition, the larger wall-hangings permit the women to tell their own stories.

Florence Mdlolo,
“Khululiwe”,
Amazwi Abesifasane (Voices of Women) project,
2000-1, embroidered cloth, 28 x 41 cm
Create Africa South, Durban

Indeed, starting in the late 1990s, embroidery projects were seen as a means for reconciling a divided society by recording diverse histories. For example, in 2000, sculptor Andries Botha founded the Amazwi Abesifazane (Voices of Women) project in Zwa-Zulu Natal to use pictorial cloths to permit “the rather tentative, fragile, and endangered human stories to become part of the history that we (South Africans) need to conserve.” This approach has since become standard in embroidery projects and has permitted the women to voice a broad range of concerns from poverty to domestic violence to HIV.

The Current Project:  Margaret Woermann and Jennifer Fish have been friends for over twenty years, and when the pandemic and lockdown hit, Woermann asked the women to “depict their lives” to begin the social documentation of what would become a defining moment. Fish then suggested that the works become a special collection to provide needed financial assistance due to the closure of their established market outlets. As Woermann urged, the Heartworks Stitching Club’s recent cloths condense the personal experiences of the women during the lockdown in stunning cloths depicting moving episodes from their lives. Each of the cloths presents the same fraught themes in differing ways: the lack of availability of food, the closing of schools, the loss of jobs, the constant surveillance by police, and finally, the fear and illness that the conoravirus has spread in their communities. 

The individual motifs do appear as if they were scenes witnessed firsthand, and so in the cloth reproduced here, the depiction of “food relief” in the top half includes a pick-up truck stacked with bags of maize and other foodstuffs and a woman standing nearby handing bags to a line of people waiting; this image of the government’s active response to the crisis contrasts with the negative image of a woman and her two children being evicted from their home at the bottom of the cloth. Despite government efforts, people are still experiencing severe illness and unemployment as a result of the virus. As with the sale of the artworks in the Lockdown Collection, the proceeds from the sale of the Heartworks Stories project’s cloths will go to support vulnerable artists, in this instance the women of the Heartworks Stitching Club.

Mark Auslander: Taken together, these works highlight a central paradox of the Covid-19 crisis. The SARS-CoV-2 pathogen does indeed stalk all human beings indiscriminately: as one embroidery proclaims, the disease, chooses "no rich no poor." Yet the actual impact of the virus and the associated Lockdown does have enormously variable impact according to socioeconomic status and where one is located in the racialized geographies of contemporary South Africa. Predominantly white middle and upper class professionals, whose work allows them them to labor digitally and remotely, find the Lockdown highly inconvenient, but are, for the most part, able to endure in relative safety and security. For the millions of low income individuals, overwhelmingly people of color,  in urban,  periurban and rural contexts, the Lockdown is devastating, annihilating income sources and undercutting basic survival strategies, as access to clean water and basic foodstuffs is blocked.  Vulnerability to the novel coronavirus itself is deepened through medical histories related to pre-existing conditions emerging out of poverty (including, presumably, respiratory conditions associated with long exposure to charcoal cook fires or mining labor) and unequal access to medical care.  Queues for food relief, imaged in the embroidery above and in Themba Khumalo's haunting drawing, "Waiting for Food Parcels," have become a disturbing feature of the South African landscape in recent weeks, as food lines stretch at times for miles.

As in the early popular embroidery projects referenced by Pam,  the juxtaposition of text and image in these works is particularly fascinating. The letters and the depictions of people and places share the same vivid colors and seem to leap off the embroidered surfaces.  Sometimes, the words seems like whispered prayers, expressing hope for a better future; at other times one has the sense of bring privy to an anxious interior dialogue, hearing all the jumbled thoughts running through the minds of mothers and grandmothers contemplating how they will provide for all those who depend on them.

Words are used at times to heighten the impact of this ingeniously compressed storytelling, and to create discrete story panels that organize a complex visual field. In the work above, the overall predicament is signaled the phrase, "No Embroidery, No Work," stitched across the top. In the middle section, the words  "army" and the "police"  set up the next story image, as a law enforcement vehicle descends on Shebeen filled with dancing revelers, violating social distance orders. In the lower section, the words "We are starving, I am scared of losing lives," is keyed to an image of emergency medical workers rolling out a dangerously ill patient to a waiting ambulance.

Most of the works depict township contexts in the area around Cape Town, but in this image, "Stay at Home," we see  a village setting, perhaps from the Eastern Cape, a stark reminder of the particularly harsh conditions existing at the moment in rural areas.  Even the church, normally provider of spiritual strength and comfort at a time of crisis, is shuttered. Stitched words proclaim "no industry, no social life." Relatives from urban areas, who would normally visit with gifts and financial support, are prevented from traveling; the only vehicle shown is a police lorry, most likely enforcing Lockdown in a  draconian fashion.  

And yet, life endures. Masked women continue their daily round of life-providing activities,  including carrying foodstuff and preparing meals. Trees, living bridges between the visible world and the invisible world of the ancestors, still provide shade and shelter.   Flowers blossom and birds sing. In the upper left, women in traditionalist attire dance to a drum, one carrying a fly whisk used by traditional healers and diviners.  Performing a dance of healing, they summon the energies of the shades to restore a measure of balance to a land deeply out of equilibrium.

Franz Boas wrote long ago that the work of indigenous storytelling --anchored in what Claude Levi- Strauss later termed the improvisational process of "bricolage"--centers on calling into being "new worlds from fragments."   Like all the women engaged in this beautiful, inspiring  project, these dancing healers are well aware of the vast privations and viral dangers that surround them. Yet they remain committed to stitching back together the social continuum, out of all the scattered pieces of the present moment.

Ellen Schattschneider:  In the first embroidery pictured here, "My work affected," the dominant, central figure is shrouded in white, pushing a smaller figure in a wheelchair. Manifestly this is a medical worker, clothed in a Hazmat protective suit; similar white uniformed figures appear at the base of  "No embroidery no work" wheeling out a desperately ill patient or cadaver on a stretcher to the waiting ambulance.  The color white may have further associations with sangoma traditional healers, whose regalia often incorporate white beads, evocative of the ancestral shades who are sources of insight and healing power. As Mark notes, the trees and ritual performers in some tapestries may further signal or invoke amorphous ancestral presences. Through these works one might even say that the Dead are actively incorporated into the community at its time of great trial.: Might the diminutive figure in the wheelchair be a stand in for all of us, vulnerable and at the mercy of nefarious invisible forces, ultimately assisted by invisible powers of a greater dominion than the microscopic virus itself?  These embroidered object-images are surely more than simple techniques of income generation. They are active technologies of self and of the sacred, summoning up the benevolent powers of the invisible world to help repair breaches in the moral continuum, registered in the bodies and souls of those who struggle on, against all odds, on the economic margins of the South African social field.

For information on purchasing a Story in Solidarity, please contact Jennifer Fish at jennifernfish@gmail.com.

More information is at:

https://jennifernataliefishphotography.mypixieset.com/heartworks/?fbclid=IwAR1nhEwqUKU7oRdZXeX_7ISutnjKI3Cwqvz9mpklLs1NcfpIrCgPSJV68ms