...And the Thorns Were Cleared from the Path
More images coming soon... until then you can see some examples on Instagram: @sarahgsharp
And the Thorns Were Cleared from the Path... is a body of work based on select illustrations of plant life connected to women’s labor and lives from different phases of New Harmony Indiana's Utopian Communities' timeline, including plants harvested and cultivated before and during the settler colonial era by native peoples; plants cultivated during the Harmonist period; and plants harvested, cultivated and imported during the Owen-Maclure and "afterglow" periods. I adapt these drawings into hand and machine embroideries and tapestries that reference textile works found in the Working Men’s Institute Archives and a series of silk scarfs inspired by descriptions of traditional Swabian accessories worn by Harmonist women and silk designs produced by Gertrude Rapp found in the USI - Historic New Harmony collection.
New Harmony’s well known histories of powerful women are a well-preserved, important backdrop to this body of work providing the space, in many ways, for the work of lesser known regional women to be preserved. During my visit to New Harmony in March 2025, I was able to spend time with a few specific textile items from the Working Men’s Institute collection and while at the University of Southern Indiana’s Historic New Harmony collection I saw several Gertrude Rapp silks themed with floral patterns, and was able to access Minerva society documents that helped me to form these ideas.
New Harmony was home to the first women's group in the US: the Minerva Society. In her 1904 letter to the editor of The Woman’s Journal, a weekly Boston-based suffragette newspaper, Society participant Ella M. Dietz Glynes, (neé Ella Clymer, the youngest recorded member of the Minerva Society) addressed the fact that the Minerva society was founded before the Sorosis Society of New York-- a society which was often heralded as the first official Women’s Club in the US. Rather than complain, she addresses the importance of the Sorosis Society’s large public platform to “establish the right of assemblage” for women. She wrote:
The announcement that a band of women in New York had gathered together to form a society of their own was received with ridicule and scorn. However many clubs may have preceded it, none have familiarized the public mind with the idea that women could successfully organize. Many were the predictions of speedy dissolution…. Ridicule and obluquy, however, were born with patience and lived down. The way was made plain for others. The thorns were cleared from the path.
I found Ms. Glyneses cooperative acknowledgement that time, persistence and many types of representation are important. I also found in hope in her particularly salient earthly metaphor of “thorns" being "cleared from the path.” I embrace this cooperative and generative spirit in my research and making.