Flax Processing
VIDEO | MFA Thesis Project
Learn to make linen by hand! Linen production has a delightfully archaic argot— heckling! scutching!—and a fascinating array of wooden tools used to beat and break the flax plant, yielding its fibers. It’s a tremendously laborious and violent process that produces long and exceedingly strong fibers that resemble a delicate swath of golden blonde hair.
My resulting homage is an off-kilter instructional video— pre-industrial process meets YouTube tutorial. Although this piece revolves around the metamorphosis of the flax plant into linen cloth, you never see the flax as it transforms. I craved a level of abstraction, letting the viewer focus on what had captivated me most about this process: the language, the gesture, the violence. A flotilla of disembodied arms, harvested from the Rijksmuseum’s Old Master paintings drift across the screen, while YouTube presence Brother Christian Zinzendorf explains the linen making process. An ethereal composition by Hildegard von Bingen plays in the background. Cards with the corresponding tools follow the narration, and the hands uncannily come to life, demonstrating the required actions. It’s simultaneously explanatory and surreal.
Learn to make linen by hand! Linen production has a delightfully archaic argot— heckling! scutching!—and a fascinating array of wooden tools used to beat and break the flax plant, yielding its fibers. It’s a tremendously laborious and violent process that produces long and exceedingly strong fibers that resemble a delicate swath of golden blonde hair.
My resulting homage is an off-kilter instructional video— pre-industrial process meets YouTube tutorial. Although this piece revolves around the metamorphosis of the flax plant into linen cloth, you never see the flax as it transforms. I craved a level of abstraction, letting the viewer focus on what had captivated me most about this process: the language, the gesture, the violence. A flotilla of disembodied arms, harvested from the Rijksmuseum’s Old Master paintings drift across the screen, while YouTube presence Brother Christian Zinzendorf explains the linen making process. An ethereal composition by Hildegard von Bingen plays in the background. Cards with the corresponding tools follow the narration, and the hands uncannily come to life, demonstrating the required actions. It’s simultaneously explanatory and surreal.
The video production itself was incredibly labor-intensive: hours in Photoshop spent meticulously cutting and articulating finger joints, followed by more hours in After Effects animating them. A funny avenue for expressing this content, perhaps. But it was important for me to represent this preindustrial practice from the perspective of the 21st century. Industrial and now digital technology has upended our relationship to the material world and physical labor. Glued to our desks and screens, we now watch YouTube videos of others performing manual labor, an activity tinged with exoticism and nostalgia, while we ourselves execute inordinate amounts of digital labor.