cross, twist, cross

Using lace as both material and metaphor, my project explores women’s labour as an embodied knowledge. Inspired by Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, it reimagined the intimacy and repetition of lacemaking as a quiet act of resistance. Guided by the rhythm of cross, twist, cross, it drew on the feminist framework of vrouwenwerk (women’s work) to connect historical and contemporary making. The grid of fourteen lace squares referenced the seventeenth-century merklap, leaving one space empty to honour unseen makers and their forgotten hands. Through gesture and absence, the piece is reclaiming women’s craft as a form of intellectual and cultural agency.