Logo with the name Rock Hushka
Embroidered artwork resembling a fragment of a medieval tapestry of a hunting dog's head partially obscured by digital static

A Single Stitch (Densely Repreated)

A Postmodern Embroidery Practice

Embroidered artwork resembling medieval tapestries
Embroidered artwork resembling medieval tapestries
Embroidered artwork resembling a fragment of medieval velvet covered in blood

Conceptual Embroidery

A pile of leftover thread ends and knots
Rock Hushka embroidering in the galleries of the Bellevue Arts Museum
Three young adults wrapped in a banner of a prayer to St. Sebastian

Towards a Postmodern Embroidery

As I pursued studies in art history, I dove, in varying degrees, into the texts of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, and Frederic Jameson in search of answers to “why things are” and innumerable art essays by Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, Lucy Lippard, Craig Owens, Rosalind Krauss, Marsha Tucker, and so many others. Although very few of the readings specifically addressed fiber art or textiles, these authors activated ideas about power, resistance, language, hierarchy, time, materiality, knowledge, and media. I started to imagine the themes introduced by the authors as a tangled clump of yarns that require a slow, deliberate, dedicated separation and organization before something can be constructed from them. The intellectual foundations of my education were set by instructors in the School of Art at the University of Washington. I arrived at the UW in 1986 as a transfer student studying history as a generalist with a keen interest in the history of the American West. Two quarters before completing the Bachelor of Arts degree, I realized that I had no qualifications to make an honest living, so I added majors in studio art intent on focusing on fiber art and art history. The logic seemed incontrovertible—a solid triangle moving between history, art history, and art. Beginning in 1991, graduate-level studies in art history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison required readings in postmodernism.

The decision to focus on art history was made after feedback from an art history professor who declared emphatically that I had no business studying art history as demonstrated by my grades. Wallowing in my limits in this body of knowledge was rather intoxicating. What was the system that I did not understand? Seeking this knowledge was personally empowering. My first academic experience with medieval tapestry began with independent study classes in 1991 that diverted me out of the weaving studio and into the stacks of the Art Library. I initially proposed a too-large tapestry of a cloister arcade with arches framing various works of art like a fragment of a dream attempting to sort and order miscellaneous homoerotic triggers. After weeks of negligible progress on the weaving, Professor Layne Goldsmith demanded that I ease work on the tapestry and cut it off the loom—essentially an aesthetic death penalty. We agreed that I would complete a comprehensive annotated bibliography of literature of medieval tapestry in the art library. From this experience, I learned that weaving is a magical skill just beyond my abilities and temperament while the history of tapestry became equally magical. During my research, I began to synthesize the idea that in the era just before the Renaissance, artworks depicted a cultural system in which art, science, medicine, and faith were inseparable and symbols could only be understood by activating each of these simultaneously.

Excerpted from Towards a Postmodern Embroidery (Seattle: EleventyThousand, 2023).