"The love of research and the gift for new weavings": the work, collections, and legacy of Marguerite Porter Davison
Date
2007
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This thesis examines the life and work of handweaver, author, collector, and scholar Marguerite Porter Davison. It explores how Davison played a key role in the American Handweaving Revival of the 20 th century by contextualizing her career and examining the objects she made and collected. The paper also examines the wider American Handweaving Revival by defining three phases of activity: a traditional, a transitional, and a modern phase. As a member of the transitional phase, Davison is compared to her predecessors and her contemporaries. ☐ Active between 1914 and 1953, Davison was educated at Berea College in Kentucky, a handweaving center in the Southern Highlands area. There, she developed an interest in collecting weaving pattern drafts that would continue throughout her life. Throughout her career Davison collected both historic and contemporary literature on handweaving and historic pattern woven linens and pattern drafts. From these materials Davison wrote several articles, two booklets, and two books on handweaving. Her most influential book, A Handweaver's Pattern Book, is considered to be one of the best repositories of traditional four-shaft weaving patterns, and is still used to teach handweaving today. Although Davison studied and collected historic pieces, her career focused on propelling the craft forward through experimentation with structures, treadling, and materials. Davison's own weaving production, and the philosophy she presents in her books, demonstrates how the transitional weavers pushed the ideas of what weaving could be, a key step towards the widespread recognition of weaving as an art form that occurred in the 1960s.