September 1, 2004
Textile travels
Molly Bruder works with artists in five different countries
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Roving the globe for a year, Molly Bruder forged ties with women artists in five countries.
Creating friendships that spanned generations and cultures, Bruder delved into the lives and work of women in Panama, Peru, South Africa, Vietnam and India.
The 1999 Central High School graduate traveled thanks to a Watson Fellowship. IBM founder Thomas J. Watson started the fellowship in 1962 to promote exploration of the world by recent college graduates, fostering their leadership, resourcefulness and creativity.
Bruder, who has a political science degree from Carleton College in Minnesota, spent 360 days overseas and returned to Traverse City at the end of July. The purpose of her travels was to look at how women in these cultures adapt traditional craft for economic empowerment.
"Mostly what I was looking at was appliqué and embroidery and how they make a livelihood out of traditional craft," said Bruder, whose fellowship was entitled "Understanding the Stitches: Appliqué in an Era of Marginalization."
Bruder discussed her travels and the talents and techniques of the women she met Thursday afternoon at the home of Maggie Quinn. A veteran quilting teacher, Quinn was Bruder's first formal quilting teacher. After sewing with both her grandmothers for years, during junior high school Bruder began taking classes at Quinn's studio with some friends. Approximately 40 quilters came to hear Bruder's talk and examine the array of clothing, fabric, pillows, accessories and decorations she brought back.
"For those of us who are fiber enthusiasts, it is the chance of a lifetime," said Maggie Quinn, owner of Image by Design in Traverse City.
Bruder's fabric odyssey began during her freshman year at Carleton College at an exhibit of tivaevae, beautiful bed covers ornately appliquéd by women in the Cook Islands. She completed a three-month fellowship there and brought home a completed tivaevae she made as well as a great passion for traditional women's handwork.
"That was such a wonderful experience, I said where else can I go see and where else are women working with appliqué and embroidery," Bruder recalled.
Her year-long journey began in Panama in the Sand Blas Islands. She lived and worked with the women of the Kuna people, who used reverse appliqué techniques to make molas, which are colorful and intricately stitched clothing.
"They have no electricity and work at night by lamps," she noted.
The women of the Pamplona Alta, outside of Lima, Peru, make story cloths to tell the story of life in the Andean mountains they left behind. Civil unrest in Zimbabwe sent Bruder to South Africa instead, where she lived and worked with women from a variety of cultures including the Xhosa.
"Most of the women I worked with used sewing as their one source of livelihood as single mothers," Bruder said. "A lot of the women are getting together to learn collective techniques."
In Vietnam she learned precise silk-thread embroidery from Hmong women and in India she tried her hand at the intricate silk embroidery.
"You do this until your eyesight fails," Bruder said.
Transcending language barriers was a challenge throughout her year abroad. Bruder spent her senior year in Argentina as a Rotary Exchange student and her fluency in Spanish helped her in Peru. However, the Kuna people of Panama resisted speaking Spanish so she spent a lot of time with the children learning the language.
"I know a lot of sewing vocabulary," she said, adding that in South Africa, many women spoke English and in Vietnam she wound up hiring translators.
Bruder, who spent much of her year sewing, longs to return to these countries. Long concerned with issues of social and economic justice, she wants to help promote the women's creations, their collective enterprises and economic growth.
"I saw a lot of poverty and lived in a lot of poverty, but there's also a lot of hope," she noted. "Women in these projects have had great success and I have my hope in the children. Each year the women are able to keep their children in school longer."
Bruder will be moving to Minneapolis in a few weeks, determined to find a job that merges her interest in fabrics with political science. Well aware of the realities of the job market, she forges on with her characteristic good humor.
"I'm a 23-year-old with a college degree and no job," she said. "And lots of fabric, I probably have one of the largest fabric collections of 23-year-olds."