WOVEN WORK: Disintegrating Warp Threads And Axillary Web Syndrome (AWS)
One of the possible side effects of a lumpectomy, lymph node removal and radiotherapy is cording or axillary web syndrome (AWS). AWS or ‘cording’ is the spontaneous development of fibrous strands of connective tissue beneath the skin in response to the removal of lymph nodes, sentinel node biopsy (SNB) and lumpectomy. These are palpable cords in the axillary region and emerge around a site of trauma (surgery or injury) which causes sensations of tightness beneath the skin.
I experienced upper extremity functional impairment restricting the extension of my forearm for six weeks post-surgery and at several recurrent points over the next 8 months. Cording resembles tight, rope-like cords that push up beneath the skin. They look and feel alien and uncomfortable, they limit my range of movement. By introducing internal sensations of friction and tension within myself and as a component of the body-loom assemblage I could feel the relationships between fibres, webs and weaving.
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My increased sensitivity to tension and friction emerged from within my tissues and between warp threads blending the sensations within the body-loom assemblage. The friction of threads felt continuous with the friction within my arm and torso. It is not unusual for body-loom assemblages to have to work-through and with injury. Occupational injuries have historically and continue to be a problem that textile workers face.
Thinking about what is knowable through the body and how I was trying to make the physical/mathematical phenomena of MRI, FTs and k-space knowable through weaving was interrupted by the autonomous, self-organising and seemingly non-human cords which disappeared and re-formed beneath my skin. Thinking through materiality and thinking with matter and material is important in my process and FTs and k-space became knowable through the healing, changing, and transformation of my body. All of this became imprinted within the initial sample that I wove and the subsequent practice that followed.
My sample was deeply imbricated in my subjectivity: creative practices and embodiment are the “very basis of our interaction and integration” with the world (Pallasmaa, 2017, p. 98). The affect of weaving superposes multiple ontologies, materialities, stories, experiences and interactions on me. The temporal elements of the body-loom assemblage such as pressure marks left on the body and injury are felt as material, spatio-temporal insights. The tension and affect of weaving my initial sample led me to pursue the work of weaving as the convergence where findings could be found that powerfully unite markers of my body's recovery with our era.
The creation of a textile of varying structural integrity reflected my bodily state. It started as a perfectly ordinary sample in 2018 by 2020, much like myself, it was a different entity. As I adapted to my new body, the body-loom assemblage evolved.
One of the possible side effects of a lumpectomy, lymph node removal and radiotherapy is cording or axillary web syndrome (AWS). AWS or ‘cording’ is the spontaneous development of fibrous strands of connective tissue beneath the skin in response to the removal of lymph nodes, sentinel node biopsy (SNB) and lumpectomy. These are palpable cords in the axillary region and emerge around a site of trauma (surgery or injury) which causes sensations of tightness beneath the skin.
I experienced upper extremity functional impairment restricting the extension of my forearm for six weeks post-surgery and at several recurrent points over the next 8 months. Cording resembles tight, rope-like cords that push up beneath the skin. They look and feel alien and uncomfortable, they limit my range of movement. By introducing internal sensations of friction and tension within myself and as a component of the body-loom assemblage I could feel the relationships between fibres, webs and weaving.
My increased sensitivity to tension and friction emerged from within my tissues and between warp threads blending the sensations within the body-loom assemblage. The friction of threads felt continuous with the friction within my arm and torso. It is not unusual for body-loom assemblages to have to work-through and with injury. Occupational injuries have historically and continue to be a problem that textile workers face.
Thinking about what is knowable through the body and how I was trying to make the physical/mathematical phenomena of MRI, FTs and k-space knowable through weaving was interrupted by the autonomous, self-organising and seemingly non-human cords which disappeared and re-formed beneath my skin. Thinking through materiality and thinking with matter and material is important in my process and FTs and k-space became knowable through the healing, changing, and transformation of my body. All of this became imprinted within the initial sample that I wove and the subsequent practice that followed.
My sample was deeply imbricated in my subjectivity: creative practices and embodiment are the “very basis of our interaction and integration” with the world (Pallasmaa, 2017, p. 98). The affect of weaving superposes multiple ontologies, materialities, stories, experiences and interactions on me. The temporal elements of the body-loom assemblage such as pressure marks left on the body and injury are felt as material, spatio-temporal insights. The tension and affect of weaving my initial sample led me to pursue the work of weaving as the convergence where findings could be found that powerfully unite markers of my body's recovery with our era.
The creation of a textile of varying structural integrity reflected my bodily state. It started as a perfectly ordinary sample in 2018 by 2020, much like myself, it was a different entity. As I adapted to my new body, the body-loom assemblage evolved.
While weaving leading up to my surgery and during the months following my surgery I increasingly encountered broken warp threads which had weakened over time. I fixed snapped threads as and when they occurred, pinning loose threads to the fabric I had woven. I was starting to understand what becoming an embodied and embedded body-loom assemblage felt like and what it meant. Weaving through the problem of material disintegration of the warp threads was more than significant: some threads were so fragile they would pop at my fingertips - a similar sensation to the tightness and dissolving of AWS. The possibility, clarity and validity with which I was beginning to learn from my lived experiences were motivating. How devastating snapped warp threads must have been to those experiencing the horrors of Lanarkshire’s Satanic mills. The slow violence of the cotton plantations, cloth trade and industrial textiles “disperses throughout time” with the plantation model of 1432-1850 profiting from the work of enslaved people (Shapiro, & McNeish, 2021, p. 41; Hancock, 2021, September 23). The abject is a prominent embodied experience in weaving and the textile industry through its ecological cost and its legacy of inhumane work practices. The affect of weaving is part of its embodied epistemology, it is sometimes difficult and uncomfortable, requiring discipline, practice, mistakes, time and experience. It hurts the body at times. As an artistic activity, it can become a practice of endurance and meditation, but its past and ongoing violence must never be forgotton or ignored. Being a component of the body-loom assemblage is a responsibility I wish to honour through a care-full and creaturely practice. Embodied abject sensations and experiences should neither be celebrated or ignored but understood as sensory portals into the realities and memories of body-machine interfaces exploited and justified via obscure applications of a system’s view of the body and merely a machine and expendable worker.
Without movement, my cording returned or worsened. Movement through the stresses and strains was necessary for both me and my sample. The sample reflected my own experience: the need to move through was what my body needed. I was entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, and meanings.
The sample became distorted and frayed as my bodily state imprinted itself within my fragile sample. Floating blocks of weaving activity became separated by lengths of thinning warp threads that I had cranked through the loom to move past the more visibly weak threads. Slowly, the warp threads decreased in their numbers as the gaps in the warp formed a distorted, mutated structure. Eventually, the entire albeit small specimen dropped gently from the loom with soft animality. Its spontaneous, self-forming structure emerging from the weakened warp and loss of structure reminded me of rockpool invertebrates and the autonomous movements of my stomach, heart and bowels from the MRI scans carried out with Dr Fitzke in 2018.