‘Empathic unsettlement’: trauma as spectre in contemporary textile art

Autobiographical trauma art is a way to connect its viewers with the artist and her experience, and with the history in which this experience occurred. We argue that when autobiographical trauma art involves craft practices, such as working with textiles, the relationships between history, the artist, the artwork, and the viewer become particularly strong. The interplay between the present and past, viewer and artist, through fabrication and encounter constitute, we suggest, a series of hauntings that draw attention to something broader—structural violence, selective forgetting, or wilful ignorance—in which trauma was, and remains, situated. We use examples of textile artwork by Beata Batorowicz to explore autobiographical trauma art as a tactile, embodied response to the intergenerational trauma arising from her family’s experiences in Poland during World War II. A line of hauntings, traceable from the artist via the artwork to the viewer, parallels the flowing effects of intergenerational trauma, but the intervention of the artist, in creatively addressing her own ghosts, offers the viewer and a wider public the opportunity to experience her truth-telling in the form of “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 2014 (2001), 41) and a new comprehension of a past that has fallen by the wayside of history.