Intimate Threads: Carl Stewart on weaving textiles of inclusion and queerness
As Ottawa weaver Carl Stewart unpicks the threads of a used military tent, he tells me in a phone interview, he comforts himself at the thought of two men finding solace together on a foreign battlefield. The salvaged threads from the tent will become part of Stewart’s latest effort to weave social justice into fabric, part of an ongoing project he calls wholecloth.
“As I was unweaving the tent, I was thinking about the queer trope of the soldier and how we fantasize, romanticize and fetishize the man in uniform,” Stewart writes to me later in an email. “But what I feel is most significant about the tent is the fact that it is a two-man tent. And though we can never know if the tent was ever used on a battlefield or really know the nature of the relationship of the two men who shared the tent, that in the dark and in the cold and so far from home, at least they were not alone.”
As textile makers know, wholecloth is uncut fabric straight from the loom. By carefully unwinding discarded and unwanted textiles—such as the military tent—and then remaking them into handwoven post-consumer wholecloth, Stewart explores the expressive potential of soiled material. Stewart’s practice is exceptional for recasting aspects of textile traditions associated with revulsion and exclusion. In doing so, he forges new spaces for inclusion and acceptance in nylon, canvas and wool.
Carl Stewart