Magic Square- Michael Stiles

Wool-blend crocheted lace, stretched on batons
48" x 48" x 2"
 
For me, fiber art is a deep dive into the pre-modern, and sometimes even pre-literate, world of basic making and doing. For a man in the modern world, absorbing oneself in crochet and needlework might seem necessarily to be a deep dive into issues of gender roles and social expectations, but nothing in the making process itself welcomes that kind of intellectual ferment---just the opposite! A still mind absorbed in precise, rhythmic motions of the hands, loop after loop, stitch after stitch, connection after connection... What does argument produce?