“Stitches as Seeds: Crafting New Natures” explores how fiber’s material specificity agitates universalizing notions of nature. The interpretive lens is inspired by the relational and iterative processes of much fiber art. Akin to patchwork quilting, the dissertation pieces together disparate practices including collage, needlepoint, paintings, photography, performance, and poetry together with readings of spaces such as museum dioramas, aquariums, sideshows, plantations, and parks. Queer and feminist theorizations of art history, material culture, and new materialisms frame the methodology. Ultimately, the dissertation reflects on how fiber advances more experiential possibilities for addressing urgent issues of social and ecological justice.

Each chapter focuses on a fantastical invocation of nature. Allyson Mitchell’s installation Ladies Sasquatch (2006-2010) is a sculptural vignette of erotic and menacing lesbian sasquatches—pieced together with thrifted hobby crafts like macramé and latch hook hangings—cavorting in a utopian wilderness. Aaron McIntosh’s Invasive Queer Kudzu (2013-ongoing) facilitates quilting bees for Southern LGBTQ people to stitch their personal stories onto fabric kudzu leaves. Invasive marshals ever-growing vines of quilted kudzu to invade stereotypes of the American South. Margaret and Christine Wertheim’s Crochet Coral Reef (2005-ongoing) merges feminist politics with experimental mathematics to encourage an international network of volunteers to crochet the vibrant, hyperbolic shapes of coral reefs. The crocheted reefs orient their makers towards a radically empathetic perception of nature.

As immersive and socially-engaged artworks, they illuminate the questions: Who defines nature and decides what is natural? Specifically, the fiber-based techniques leverage the historical denigration of the medium as a domestic and feminine hobby into a subversive and enduring tool of social activism. The artists’ stitches are like seeds. As they are sewn/sown, they fabricate new natures. These seductively artificial renderings of nature unravel the illusion that nature is actually natural, or neutral from surrounding cultural struggles. As such, the dissertation considers how the artworks entangle notions of the material, the social, and the spatial.