Sara Hanghøj
University of Aarhus, DENMARK
THE CONSTITUTIVE SOFA CUSHION – MATERIALIZATION ANALYSED
FROM A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
Abstract
How can personal values materialize through a hand-made everyday artefact, and how
can the artefact constitute action and self-perception? The empirical research and
analysis concerns how a former textile crafts teacher’s subjective values and
professional identity materialize through a hand-woven sofa cushion, with the sitting
room as a cultural and informal environment as its arena in 2006. The local and social
network of the informant (born 1919) is traced through a detailed cultural analysis of the
creation, usage and existence of the sofa cushion, including even the material
interactions occurring between the human body, space and artefact, thereby revealing
the materialization process. Based on results of the analysis, ANT (Actor-NetworkTheory) is used in order to discuss how The Danish Folk High School’s conception of
simplicity as an aesthetic and gendered ideal in the formal education of female
handcraft-teachers, was generated and constituted with the sofa cushion as one of many
actors.
Keywords: Home-textiles, Aesthetic and Gendered Ideals, Identity, Materiality, ANT
(Actor-Network-Theory)
Introduction
The present paper stems from research at Department of Curriculum Research, Danish
School of Education, University of Aarhus, where I practice my work as an Assistant
Professor in Material Culture and Learning. The Department offers a Master of Arts
(Education) in Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies (Material Culture).
The research and the education focuses on handcraft processes, materiality, and
curriculum related to learning, social, aesthetic and gendered issues in both formal
(school and education) and informal (home, workplace and leisure) relations and
situations . Of course we take an interest in what we are doing with and to artefacts, but
today the interest also concerns what the artefacts are doing to us (Ehn & Löfgren
2004) during creation and during daily use.
In my project (Hanghøj 2007) I distinguish `objectification´ from `materialization´
i.e. `objectification´ is the process by which an individual bring certain values, ideals
and understandings to life and create tools and other artefacts from the ideas, (Wenger
2006) while `materialization´ is the process in which meaning is negotiated and in
which values, ideals and understandings materialize in front of you during the creative
process and through the artefact in its daily use. Artefacts have their demands or
commands. They `call´ us and we must “respond rather in a bodily than a cognitive
way” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 139; Cerbone 2006: 131)
In a Danish comic strip called NEMI, it is visualised how an artefact can make
demands of a person: A female customer wants to buy a wooden bowl in a shop and the
shopkeeper informs her, that the bowl will break if she does not oil it sometimes. The
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customer gets angry – she wants a bowl which can do something for her, not the other
way around. “If I buy an artefact which makes demands of me,” she says, “I might as
well have a few children instead. I never buy clothes that have to be ironed and I never
buy curtains that need to be sewn. I don’t need that bowl; I will have a glass bowl
instead.” And the shopkeeper politely informs the customer that the glass bowl cannot
be washed in a dishwasher. “Fuck off!” the customer says and leaves the shop.
Artefacts must indeed do something to us, call and make demands of us.
To weave a cushion and to use it in a living room is not only a matter of what a person
do to the cushion, but also a matter of what the cushion does to the person. But what
can a hand-woven cushion actually do to a person? This has been the main question of
the project. What can a hand-woven cushion do through its creation, use and daily
presence in a living room, and what in particular can it do to the person who made the
cushion herself? Can it constitute action and self-perception?
Methodology
I limited my empirical choices to one artefact, one informant and one room. I thereby
challenged myself and the academic practice to see if these limited and narrow
empirical choices could bear and answer the questions of an academic investigation.
The choices were:
 A hand-woven cushion made in 1988 by
 a Danish textile handcraft teacher, Mrs. Edith Bukh, born in 1919 – who were
taught a profession in a Danish Folk High School programme aimed to educate
women as handcraft-teachers.
 The informant’s living room 2006
Like the Norwegian professor in aesthetics, culture and learning, Else Marie Halvorsen,
I regard culture as a process constructing subjective and collective identity (Halvorsen
2004). The cultural and educational context in this project is the textile handcraft
culture within the historical organisation “Højskolernes Håndarbejde” (HH) – “Folk
High School Handcrafts”. The time frame is 1930 – 2006.
“Folk High School Handcrafts” (HH) was a Danish organisation that operated from
1932 to 2002, with its heydays from the 1930s to the early 1970s. The women behind
the organisation were handcraft-teachers in the Danish Folk High Schools. They
educated women, and they created, produced and sold patterns and materials for
embroidery and weaving, inspired by `genuine´ and original material, representing the
aesthetic ideals of the Danish pre-industrial peasant culture. This production
represented a sort of invented tradition (Guldberg 1998: 44; Hobsbawn 1983: 1-14).
Together, these women formed a strong social and professional network, they were
handcraft `dictators´ and role models, and they educated many women, including the
informant of my project, through their firmly held ideals, which became not only
aesthetic, but also gendered.
Professionalizing textile handcraft and women through education included a
construction of gender in a normative emancipation. It was normative because it was
based on traditional female work including national-romantic ideals, but it also
represented an emancipation of women, because the education provided the female
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teachers an opportunity to earn their own money and to develop their own professional
life.
In my method and theory I followed the traces of the artefact, regarding the cushion as
documentation and as a non-human actor. Following the actor itself through its traces is
one of the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour’s theoretical and
methodological ideas (Latour 2005) according to the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT).
His idea of a flat social network without time- and space limits contains the idea of
human and non-human actors interacting in networks via the notion, that objects are
acting too i.e. they make a difference and play different roles in the acting of human
beings. The hand woven cushion as a non-human actor, its traces: materials, colours,
pattern, technique, its creation, use and existence and its aesthetic and gendered ideals
(e.g. simplicity), became, in collaboration with the human actor, the informant and her
narratives, one of the main entrances to the cultural analysis aimed to find answers
about materialization, about what an artefact do to a person and about how close
subject and object can be connected. The methodology included:
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Narratives and interviews
Phenomenological descriptions (Merleau-Ponty 1994, Bachelard 1994)
Detailed descriptions of the artefact as an entrance to a
Cultural analysis of the creation, usage and presence of the sofa cushion (Ehn &
Löfgren 2004)
The results of the cultural analysis is combined with an ANT analysis (Latour
2005) of simplicity as an aesthetic and gendered ideal in a never ending network
of simplicity with the sofa cushion as one of many actors
I define the concept of materiality not only as objects and artefacts but also as acts and
actions – and as relations, illustrated in the model of materialization (fig.1). In this
project following my choices and my construction the relation between body and
artefact focuses on creation, the relation between artefact and space focuses on the use
and the relation between space and body focuses on the daily existence or presence of
the cushion. These relations lead to materialization of values and understandings
illustrated in the centre of the model.
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Fig. 1: Model of materialization (Hanghøj 2007)
Creation, Use and Existence are the headlines of the main analysis in the investigation.
Under the headline “Creation - or how to connect your body with the world through the
creation of a cushion”, I examined the processes connected with choices and selections of:
 Thread and materials
 Colour
 Loom and weaving
 Pattern
 Finishing the work
The artefact (fig. 2) was chosen, because it represented the aesthetic choices of the
informant in general. The choice became obvious, when I listened to the narratives of
the informants professional and personal life, when I observed her home and home
textiles, and when I related her choices to the context of the Folk High school
Handcraft culture, which is highly documented through text books, photos,
manuscripts, articles, patterns, materials, textiles and pupils works.
The cushion was based on a pattern from HH, it was made from combed wool from
HH, vegetable dyed with chestnut and indigo mixed by the informant. It was woven on
a small handloom in a traditional Scandinavian technique, in Danish called “ligesidet
røllakken”.
Fig. 2.: “In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is
for”. (Gaston Bachelard 1958 (1994))
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Results of research
The cushion was made in 1988 by the informant, but it was based on an elder cushion
woven in the early 1960s by a woman closely connected to the informant through the
social and professional HH-network. This woman died young and the informant and
her husband adopted her only son. This fact became important in the analysis, as I
regarded the cushion as a transitional object connecting the inner and the exterior world
of the informant through textile objects and social relations according to Judy Attfield:
”Thus textiles present a particularly apposite object type to illustrate how things are
used to mediate the interior mental world of the individual, the body and the exterior
objective world beyond the self through which a sense of identity is constructed and
transacted within social relations.”
(Attfield 2000: 123)
As a transitional object the hand woven cushion combined the informant with her role
models, the other women in the HH-culture, in a social, emotional and professional
network and thereby took part in the construction of her identity.
Creation
All choices involve rejecting other possibilities. The informant did not choose artificial
materials, hand-spun wool or intense colours. I examined the cultural and aesthetic
reasons for this in detail and found that it was important in her handcraft culture to show
discipline in choice of material, thread, weaving, pattern and the body. Raw wool was
disciplined into a combed thread, which was disciplined into a certain weaving technique
including certain weaving rules disciplining the body to control itself during weaving,
using the body as a tool and the tool as body (Silvén 2004).
Through education, the informant learned identification of certain materials, colours and
techniques as a basis for making the `right´ choices according to her textile handcraft
culture. Learning practice through her formal education, she then practised her
understanding (Søndergaard 2000), not only in her own professional life as a teacher, but
also through her informal life in the living-room.
Separating the professional from the amateur was part of the professionalizing process. In
sewing the cushion together instead of using a zipper, the informant demonstrated to her
visitors and the other members of her social acquaintances, that she had the time, the
ability and the knowledge to care for, wash and handle the artefact in a professional and
correct way in accordance with the ideals of her textile handcraft culture.
The constructions of reasons for the right choices, distinguishing right from wrong,
genuine from false (materials, colours, femininity, patterns), was in the HH textile
handcraft culture derived from the textile history of women and from the functionalism.
Both aesthetic and gendered ideals lie buried here.
Use
In the analysis of the relation between artefact and space, it is relevant to take a close look
at the daily use. Thus, the living room was analysed as:
 a space of structure and order
 a poetic space
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 a space of care (care for materiality and care through materiality)
 a gendered and social space
When somebody sits on the sofa cushion, it is deformed, and the informant responds to
the `call´ of the cushion by bringing it back to its original form and structure, shaking it up
and beating it. This is possible because of its fluffy down filling. The living room of the
informant is dominated by functionalism and simplicity. When her housekeeper has
cleaned and left the house, the informant “brings things back to order in the living room”,
(my translation) correcting the placing of cushions and ornaments – it is a bodily feeling,
she explains, she cannot help it. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty this can be
explained by the idea of a subjective body-scheme (Merleau-Ponty 1994). In this case the
classic ideal of composition called “the golden section”, as the informant learned it
through her education, has become a part of her personal body-scheme. “The individual
elements must be more similar than different” is the informant’s motto. It is her own way
to express the principle and the rules of the golden section and of simplicity, and she
transfers this rule from the way she chooses and uses her patterns in textile handcraft (eg.
the pattern of the handwoven cushion) to the way she keeps her home tidy in a certain
gendered way. Thereby the ideal of simplicity becomes both aesthetic and gendered.
Taking care of home textiles during creation and use and taking care of the home is here
not only seen as gendered action but also as a sensory and tactile action and experience.
The French philosopher and phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard points out how taking
care of a furniture means creating.
“…when he puts a little fragrant wax on his table with the woollen cloth that lends
warmth to everything it touches, he creates a new object. He increases the object’s human
dignity.”
(Bachelard 1994:67)
In the period from 1956-1959, new textile patterns by HH were presented weekly through
articles in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten. This included not only descriptions of the
textiles, but also directions and ideals for decorating the home and for the `right´ life for a
housewife. The headlines of the articles comprise an extract of meaning showing that the
cushion was `humanized´, and that the woman and the cushion in the 1950s were expected
to have the same functions in the home. Here are a few examples of headlines:
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The Cushion for Decoration and Usefulness
It Cheers up the Living Room
Cushions must be Quiet
A Cushion has many Tasks
The strategy of rationalizing and formalizing the home, started by functionalism as a
social programme in Denmark in the 1930s supported by the Danish Government,
architects and Danish Women’s organisations, and it led to a focus on cleanliness and
order and made simplicity a duty more than a liberation with the sofa cushion as one of
many actors. The textile handcraft culture HH and the The Danish Folk High School
played a role in this emerging social network of functionalism and simplicity, by using the
home textiles as actors to obey the aesthetic rules and by using the housewife as a
gendered and aesthetic actor and main keeper of better homes.
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Not all women obeyed these directions of simplicity. A comparison of the functionalistic
living-room of the informant (fig. 3) and that of another Danish female handcraft-teacher
of the same age, but rooted in a different textile handcraft culture (fig. 4), made me
imagine the informant visiting the other woman in her living room and reverse. Their
body-schemes would most likely both be challenged in different ways by the other
woman’s home because of the differences in aesthetic choices and the differences in the
numbers of materials, colours, techniques and things. It is simplicity and austerity versus
diversity and homeliness.
Fig. 3: Simplicity and austerity
Fig. 4: Diversity and homeliness
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Conclusions
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Artefact, body and space are united in the sofa cushions’ creation, usage and presence.
In the informant’s mind the social, professional and historic background and
environment for the cushion’s creation blends with the social environment for the
cushion’s use today. The ideas and understanding of practice deriving from the
informant’s educational life (e.g. the golden section) materialize in the informant’s
practice of understanding in her every day life and becomes part of her body-scheme.
The sofa cushion represents compressed time, the amateur is separated from the
professional, the knowledge and care of the informant materializes through the
cushion in the form of the informant’s values in life and the cushion hereby
constitutes her professional identity.
Knowledge was seen as power in the education of textile handcraft teachers in the
middle of the twentieth century, setting the amateur apart from the professional in a
marginalising and excluding way. How is the situation today in the educational handcraft world, do we share knowledge instead?
Simplicity is not only an aesthetic ideal but also a gendered ideal which becomes part
of the informant’s body scheme. This led me to an ANT analysis of the local network
of the informant placed in a global network:
The Never-ending Network of Simplicity in Time and Space.
Human and non human actors :
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Simplicity as an ideal is older than functionalism as ideology and as style
The Danish Folk High School – aesthetic and Scandinavian ideals
The City Hall of Copenhagen (1905) is “the Danish Folk High School marching into
the capital in clogs” (my translation)(Abrahamsen 1994: 117)
Martin Nyrop – architect
HH patterns and materials as conveyers of aesthetic ideals through education and
through the letter box in private homes as mail order business
The sofa cushion
The informant and her role models
Cleanliness and structure – gendered ideals
Project Housewife and functionalism as a social programme (Schmidt 1986)
Young peoples revolt against simplicity and cleanliness in the 1970s
“Less is more” (Mies van der Rohe - Bauhaus)
If I refer this project to the title of the conference the conception of the new word
“Crafticulation” is not only a matter of expressing yourself through craft but also a matter
of how crafts constitute action, professional identity and self-perception.
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