luna naumer mateos

IS THE GARMENT A DEITY?

In this essay, I’d like to talk with you about a garment I made a few months ago and the consequence of relating it to a spiritual context.
Last February and March, I wove a black textile on a 1.5m wide pedal loom. It’s 4.5 m long, with three holes you can pass your arms through. It’s a blend of cotton (warp) and wool (weft).
This garment has a rectangular shape and is worn by wrapping it around your body and head, until only your head, hands and feet are visible.This black woven garment is part of a research into female deities. Which made me wonder if this garment itself could function as such. The word ‘deity’ comes from the Old French word deite, the ecclesiastical Latin deitas and the Greek theotes. The OED definition of a deity has three subcategories. I would like to analyse these in detail.

Let’s start with the primary definition of a deity, which describes it as a “god or goddess,” usually in a polytheistic religion. These deities are represented or described as human-formed, or otherwise similar to humans, sometimes with extraordinary features, such as different skin colours, multiple limbs and eyes, or the ability to fly or transform. This definition leads only to the conclusion that, since the garment doesn’t represent a god or a goddess, and since it's not a deity in the traditional sense, it cannot be categorised as a deity. In other words, the garment is not an eternal or omnipresent being nor does it posses extraordinary qualities. This description refers only to beings, not objects.

C. Scott Littleton defines a deity a little differently, as a “being with powers greater than those of ordinary humans, but who interacts with humans, positively or negatively, in ways that carry humans to new levels of consciousness, beyond the grounded preoccupations of ordinary life.” Together with Huw Owen, who says that deities can also be “finite entities or experiences,” this helps me arrive at the idea of a deity as an experience or as something that can interact with humans. When I think about textiles, especially the one I made, it instantly matches with the idea of a garment for interaction with humans.
To learn how to weave a textile, to create a warp and weave it in the loom and to wear it afterwards is all a social experience. For millennia, womxn have been sharing the knowledge of weaving and sharing space in which to create, with weavers as well as with other people.
I find weaving a technique that leads to special connections and a different focus on time and space. Weaving brings me to a different pace: getting away from the high speed textile industry, I go back into the craft of making and slow down my process to a human speed. For me, that’s the first interaction where time and this garment brings humans to a new level of consciousness. To wear it then means to embody experience and knowledge, to feel on my skin the time and effort. To care for my body with the touch of the past and the present. To sense history.
This garment can be a deity then through the connections that it creates to the maker, to the wearer and to a timeless collection of moments. These experiences might then not be able to be explained or understood through words or consciousness but through touch or feeling. That would be my definition of a deity. A deity as an agent to influence people and situations. But then if we accept it as a deity there is still the idea of it being eternal, where it sounds like the memories contained in this garment are from womxn who actually lived. It’s interesting then to look at how this is both a deity constituted by human interaction and also can influence this interaction.