Labor

From its inception in the 16th century up until the 19th century, European needle or bobbin lace remained an intensive, extremely specialized craft traditionally carried out by women exclusively.

The value and fascination of lace derives mostly from its fabrication and not the originality of its design or the internal value of the material used — most of the time linen or later cotton. Lace commanded a high price, reserving its use for the wealthy religious or secular elite and drawing attention from other cultures as an object of fascination.

The exhibition traces the passage of this craft from the hands of female lacemaking guilds to industrially made machine-lace products designed for repeatability and speed. In contrast, robotics of today can be employed for bespoke, differentiated tasks, suggesting a move away from standardization and a return back to customization. We find that the fundamental differences between the kinematics and control of humans and robots, however analogous, can lead to new, unexpected results.

Alt test tk — In modern times, hand-made lace remained both a product of luxury and a sign of restraint and modesty. These last qualities were expressed by the material itself, threads of linen or cotton, and by the color, white, a symbol of purity. Members of the New England upper class, like Elizabeth Allen Marquand, wife of one of the founders of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and mother of its first director, aimed to present themselves as the moral descendants of the Puritan settlers. But hand-made lace was also a luxury item: the labor and skill that went into its creation transformed the cheap raw material into one of the most expensive items of a lady’s wardrobe.

John Singer Sargent

*Elizabeth Allen Marquand,* 1887

Oil on canvas, 169 x 107 cm.

From Princeton University Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Eleanor Marquand Delanoy, granddaughter of the sitter. y1977-77.

Lace Makers, Pen and black ink with brushed white highlights by August Jaccaci — Signed and dated in Venice 1888, this drawing by the French-born American artist and historian August Jaccaci represents a series of female needle lacemakers and is probably set in the island of Burano, in the laguna. Burano was one of the main centers for the creation of the finest and most sought-after lace in the early modern period, until the beginning of the 19th century when the craft almost died out. In 1872, following a severe winter impacting the fishing industry, a group of noble Italian women, led by countess Adriana Marcello and queen Margherita of Savoy, established a school aimed at reviving the art of needle lacemaking and providing an income for the islanders. The drawing probably shows one of the school’s first cohorts of women trained in the art. The school and its museum, the Burano Museo del Merletto, are still active today, even if the hardship and labor required to create hand-made lace generally fail to attract a younger generation of islanders who now mostly live from the tourist industry.

August Jaccaci

*Lace Makers,* 1888

Pen and black ink with brushed white highlights, 21.4 x 30 cm.

From Princeton University Art Museum, Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr.. x1946-394.

Japanese woodblock print by anonymous author — By the end of the 18th century, several inventors had tried to design machines capable of producing lace. One of them, John Heathcoat, is shown on this Japanese woodblock print. Part of the series “Lives of Great People of the Occident,” it represents Heathcoat offering his wife the first successful result from his knitting machine. A product that was until then exclusively made by female labor, is here manufactured by male entrepreneurs. Heathcoat would end up establishing a lucrative lacemaking factory in Tiverton, Devon, after his first establishment was destroyed by the Luddites, a secret association of textile workers fighting against mechanization. This story highlights the tensions in the lacemaking industry between skilled craftsmen and manufacturers. Machine-made lace would never entirely replace hand-made lace, but would significantly reduce the number of traditional lacemakers, depriving many craftswomen of a source of important income.

Japanese, Meiji period, 1868–1912, Anonymous

*John Heathcoat (1783–1861): Inventor of the Lacemaking Machine (Shon Hiisukouto mentai shokki), from the series “Lives of Great People of the Occident” (Taisei ijin den)*

Woodblock print (ōban tatee format); ink and color on paper, 35.9 x 25 cm

From Princeton University Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Straka. x1983-80.

Three industrial robotic arms working collaboratively to make lace — We develop a collaborative robotic fabrication process for constructing largely deforming elastic network structures inspired by traditional bobbin lace. We leverage both sensing and predictive modeling to inform our tool paths — however, our implementation of these methods is greatly simplified by the use of a repeated module known as an \textit{interlaced bigon}, as well as an assumedly large elastic range of the material. To achieve geometric variation in the network, we intentionally deform the material to fit an idealized instance of this module during fabrication. The structure is then passed along by the robots and assembly of subsequent modules continues. When each module is released, the structure relaxes into its natural state. Per bobbin lacing topological rule, the order and manner in which the strands are worked lead to even more formal possibilities. Our approach demonstrates how this unique construction logic and its ensuing geometry, coupled with limited predictive numerical modeling and a simple computer vision system allows for the bottom-up fabrication of highly complex, tunable elastic networks for which the final shape and scale may not be known.

*Robotic Lacing*

From Princeton University CREATE Lab.