A Life in Lace
Submitted by Lori Merhige on Tue, 09/22/2009 - 02:03
I grew up in a machine shop. Ten to fifteen yard long embroidery machines rhythmically clanging all day, the smell of oil on hardwood floors, manly men working sewing machines. Hudson county New Jersey, where I now live, the ‘Embroidery Capital of the World.’ Or at least it was. Begun by my grandfather, improved and expanded by my father, with his brother and sister at his side. I always had a job at Manhattan Lace, even before I was old enough to know what a good work ethic was. But by the late nineties, it became clear that it was all going to hell. Or should I say, China. The business was no longer viable as a way to make a living for three adults with grown children and mortgage payments. But it was pretty decent if you were 25 years old with no house or kids, and you were a good girl trying to be an artist and needing to pay the rent with flexibility. In October 2001 my family threw in the towel. Manhattan Lace had gone from a viable company with 40 employees and three factories, to a one-woman show in a rented office and a handful of vendors to do the manufacturing. Thinking I’d get a year or two of decent pay out of it, I took over the family business.
Eight years later I am still in business, and have been using the materials from the shop in my artwork. In 2009 I made this video piece. I had been scrolling through some images of our lace designs, and was struck by how the images, when viewed one after another, seemed to measure time. Thread has long been seen as a metaphor for storytelling. The word textile contains the word text, after all. Thread woven or embroidered into lace intimates at a vast richness of a thousand stories, memories that may soon be lost. With this piece I am trying to measure a lifetime, in lace.
