Page 47 - Constructing Craft

Fibre

When Vivienne Mountford, a New Zealand weaver, considered the history of the
fibre crafts in the 1980s she employed the idea of a braided river as a metaphor.

‘Just as the river flows seaward in an ever-changing pattern of braided streams;
some wide, some narrow, ever-changing, now flowing parallel then intersecting to

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reappear separate again, so the textile crafts take on a similar pattern.’ She
argued that for centuries the different forms of textile craft – ‘tapestry, handweaving,

embroidery, lacemaking, patchwork, fabric printing, batik, paper making and knitting

etc’ had developed separately but in the 1980s they merged, ‘crossing and
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recrossing’ to the extent ‘that textiles will never again be a definable area’.
However, she qualified her observation. In New Zealand, she claimed, the streams
were still mainly flowing independently. The compartmentalisation of the fibre crafts

can be explained, in part, by its history.

Unlike pottery, the traditions of weaving, spinning and other forms of textile craft

were strong in New Zealand and there are no doubts as to who were the first fibre
craftspeople. There is evidence that Māori possessed advanced weaving skills

when Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century and they had probably carried

these skills from Polynesia when they arrived in New Zealand seven hundred years
earlier. Aspects of this history are examined later in this chapter.

Europeans began to arrive in large numbers in the late 1830s. Unlike agriculture

and horticulture equipment, looms and spinning wheels were not an economic
necessity because by that time the industrial revolution had already superseded the

handspinning and handweaving industries in Britain. Nevertheless, they were in

evidence – especially at church missions where Māori girls were being taught to use
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them from 1843. Early weaving was also restrained by a lack of wool but a few
pioneers attempted to set up businesses. In 1845, Nelson settler Thomas Blick
established a woollen mill based on handlooms, later adapted to water power, and

using woollen yarn spun by German immigrant women. In Otago in 1853, Johnny
Barr began advertised a weaving service for spinners to turn their wool into

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‘Shepherd Tartans, blankets, plaiding etc.’ While early records of commercial

Constructing Craft