Ruth Scheuing is an artist who works in textiles, with a focus on how textiles communicate through patterns, as language and mythology and how they reflect women’s history as well as global trade. Her work often explores new technologies, such as computerized Jacquard looms and GPS (Geographical Positioning System) technology, Google Earth and Satellites.

Recent exhibitions include: Contextile Biennale 2024, Guimaraes, Portugal; I wanted to go on a Spacewalk but had nothing to wear, 2022, in North Vancouver; Ancient Women in Textiles 2019 and Women’s Work 2018 at the Italian Culture Center in Vancouver; and Connecting Threads 2018 and Silkroads 2010 at the Surrey Art Gallery; the Canadian Craft Biennale in Burlington, Ontario; Countermapping for the PUSH Festival, 2010 Vancouver,and  ‘Dreamland’ at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto.

Upcoming exhibitions include the Biennale Internationale du lin de Portneuf, Quebec, Canada, June 16 – Oct 5, 2025, and The Medusa: An Archetype in Contemporary Mythology at the Italian Cultural Centre in Vancouver, Canada in August 2025.

Published writings include “Penelope or the Unraveling of History” as part of New Feminist Criticism: Critical Strategies, edited by Katy Deepwell, published by Manchester University Press and co-editing with Ingrid Bachmann ‘material matters: the Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles’, published by YYZ, Toronto in 1999; to be reissued in an updated version 2025. She is included in Art Textiles of the World: Canada, a Telos publication of 2009, received the Chalmers Award in Crafts in 1996 ,and the Vancouver Mayor’s Award in 2010. She taught in the Textile Arts Program at Capilano University from 1994-2014 and she has been a member of TSA (textile Society of America) since 2000.

Her studio, founded as TAD (Textile Arts Department) in 2014, focuses on making a Digital AVL Jac3 Jacquard loom available to the community. It is located on Granville Island in Vancouver and is part of ‘The Salish Blanket Company’, led by the Musqueam weavers, mother and daughter Debra and Aleen Sparrow.

Take it away, Ruth!

 

What path led you to create weavings based on Ada Lovelace?  And how did Lovelace’s work influence your weaving as a whole?

When I first heard about Ada Lovelace, I had the opportunity to learn Jacquard weaving in 1997 and I read several biographies about Ada Lovelace and my first weaving had her image and her famous sentence “The Analytical Engine Weaves Algebraic Patterns, Just as the Jacquard Loom Weaves Flowers and Leaves” …. Ada had translated a text by Manabrea about Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, an early version of a computer, in 1843. Her notes took up more space than the original text and contained the above quote and the first instance of written software. Ada’s way of thinking about computers already included artistic approaches and certainly brought the importance of textiles and floral patterns to the forefront.

I became fascinated by the early Jacquard looms, developed in 1804 by Joseph Marie Jacquard, who used punched cards for a complex patterned weaving. Napoleon funded this new technology to fill his empty war chest and to compete with the demands for weavings with elaborate ‘Flowers and Leaves’ brought back from Asia during the 18th century. It provided me with an excellent reason for giving floral patterns new meaning. It also highlights unintended developments in technology.

I have also worked on a historical Jacquard loom, that uses punched cards and researched the archive of Honey Hooser, a local handweaver, who brought a Jacquard head for her loom in the 1950’s from England, which I helped restore in 2014. Later I also punched a new pattern on a set of cards using a laser cutter.

How does your work explore the questions of traditional boundaries between women’s work and technology?

While the making of textiles is often seen as an ancient way of working by hand, textiles are also at the forefront of technological change and have long played an important economic and social role and still do so today with global markets. They reflect cultures, colonial relationships, cause trade wars and labour protests. When industrial spinning and weaving was introduced in the 19th century in the UK, it left us the term ‘luddite’. The recently published Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchand goes into details of these worker protests and how they also reflect current issues with AI adoption in the workplace today.

My relationship with ‘Flowers and Leaves’ evolved over time, influenced by backyard gardening and hiking in local mountains, as well as historical ornate textiles from the Rococo period in the 18th century. I am interested in examining how nature came to be used as ‘decoration’ and associated with the ‘feminine’. Definitions of ‘nature’ reveal a range of contradictory meanings. Nature often suggests that which is separate from human activity and is used to project desires seemingly unattainable, thus “nature becomes romanticized, patronized and forever the passive recipient of our desires” (Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human). Donna Haraway in the Cyborg Manifesto proposes more fluid boundaries between humans, animals and machines. She suggests: “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are Cyborg”(Simian, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature).

Most of my current work is done by combining imagery from a variety of sources, which I then weave by hand on a digital Jacquard loom. This allows me to create my art works with my hands, supported by new technologies.

Your Flying Women pieces explore the experiences of two historical women, Sarah Henley and Sophie Blanchard.  Can you tell us their stories and what path led you to these flying women?

I heard a story on the radio, about a woman, who jumped off a bridge and survived the fall due to the parachuting of her hooped skirt and had an immediate image in my head of how she would float down. When I googled it, I found it to be the true story of Sarah Henley, who in 1862 jumped off a bridge, but survived the fall and lived to an old age.

When a group of us saw a newspaper headline ‘I wanted to go on a spacewalk, but had nothing to wear’, about a NASA space mission, that lacked spacesuits in women’s sizes, it became the title for a four-woman show in 2023. I explored Sarah Henley’s story and wanted to show how fashion shapes women’s actions in ways that is not always predictable. When looking for more stories about women flying, I became fascinated by Sophie Blanchard, who was the first woman balloonist in the early 1800’s. ( Jean-Marie Jacquard invented the Jacquard loom in 1801.) She performed more than 60 ascents as a solo balloonist after the ballooning death of her husband Jean-Pierre Blanchard. She performed during official functions for Napoleon, who promoted her as “Aeronaut of the Official Festivals” and Louis XVIII in 1814, who promoted her to “Official Aeronaut of the Restoration”. She was killed in 1819 when her balloon caught fire, by fireworks she had launched from her balloon in the air. Sophie was said to be a shy and petite women, but with a flair for drama, who chose fashionable dresses for these tours in the air at freezing temperatures.

While researching this show, I was excited to find many mythological women who had wings. Many were goddesses and celebrated, but others were depicted as monsters and feared. They include Isis, Eris, Nike, Inanna and Lilith, Eos, the Goddess of the Dawn and the more sinister Harpys, Sirens and Furies (or Erinyes) who were feared.  Often different versions of stories existed in historical sources. The story of Medusa is compelling: Athena transformed her into a monster after Poseidon assaulted her in Athena’s temple. The mortal Medusa was given wings together with her immortal Gorgon sisters. I want to explore all the stories of these powerful female figures who held power over men. At the same time these images of Flying Women symbolized freedom.

Mythology had been the focus of my early in the 90’s, where my focus was on weaving related stories particularly Arachne. She challenged Athena to a weaving contest, where she wove many dubious situations of Greek Gods seducing women. Athena was furious and transformed Arachne into a spider; Arachne could still weave but no longer tell stories. This transformation is described in Ovid’s ‘metamorphoses’ and a famous print from 1860 by Dore, shows how Dante finds Arachne in Purgatory as half woman, half spider, an image I found quite disturbing.  So with my new interest with the monstrous I wanted to create a more heroic hybrid form of a spider/woman based on a Drider, in 2018, found in contemporary Dungeons & Dragons culture.

A question from Ruth: As a historian, how do you see a role for historical fiction, particularly related to myths? There is lots of it out there and one finds it under headings like science fiction.

I have gone on record more than once as believing that historical fiction can be a valuable entryway into historical interest, especially when, as Megan Marshall puts it in a recent essay in the New York Times,  such books “don’t seek to pass for biographies, in which the play of the author’s imagination with people of the past takes center stage, and questions of verisimilitude recede.” Certainly historical fiction of many kinds played an important role in developing my own interest in history.

Myth is different creature for me, both as an  inspiration for fiction (or weaving) and as an occasional historical source.

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Interested in learning more about Ruth and her work?

Attend one of her group exhibitions in 2025:
“Eos-Goddess of the Dawn” at the Biennale Internationale du lin in Portneuf, Quebec, Canada June 16 – Oct 5, 2025 https://biennaledulin.com/
The Medusa: An Archetype in Contemporary Mythology at the Italian Cultural Centre  / in Vancouver, Canada, August 2025.

Visit her website: https://www.ruthscheuing.com/

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Tomorrow will be business as usual here on the Margins with a blog post from me. Then we’ll be back on Monday with three questions and an answer with art historian Sarah Hagglund