Spin Club Stories

In Spin Club Stories, Astrid Reischwitz explores personal and cultural memory influenced by her upbringing in a small farming village in Northern Germany. She uses keepsakes from family life, old photographs and embroidered fabric from the village to build a world of memory, identity and home. The Boston based artist takes cues from the old tradition of spin clubs in her village, where village women met to spin wool and create needlework— and share stories while they worked. She transforms this tradition of storytelling into a visual journey. Her own embroidered designs are partial representations of her ancestral linens, emphasizing the fragmentary nature of recollection. By following the stitches in these fabrics, she follows a path through the lives of her ancestors and converses with the past.