Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond’s Floorpieces

In 1973, the artist Harmony Hammond made a series of artworks entitled Floorpieces. Based on traditional rag-rug techniques, these braided fabric pieces were selectively painted and then placed, like rugs, directly on the ground. The making of the Floorpieces coincided with Hammond coming out, and their spiraling, braided form is suggestive of both lesbian erotics and traditions of women’s handicraft. Hammond’s work challenges many of the binary oppositions that continue to structure conversations of craft—high/low, masculine/feminine, functional/decorative. This article argues that Hammond’s destruction of binaries activates a queer space, and that her handmade abstractions open up possible directions for a productive queering of the category of craft that is attentive to sexuality and class.