Mats

Threads connect the tapestries of life, the warp threads running vertically and the weft threads horizontally, the shuttle and needle knotting and making patterns. Weaving has long histories in myths, legends, and contemporary culture. This chapter puts historical and contemporary mat production in relation with mats used in ECEC settings. The mat as a signifier of things is a material object that has agentic capacities to affect and be affective. These affects traverse time and place-spaces, generating connections between human, non-human, and multispecies kin bodies. Mats claim spaces. As places they become territories and are territorial, they define activities and function as delineators. Mats are affective, they can be something to sleep on, sit on, rest on, to be calm, to disturb, delineate classroom territories, and mark acceptable spaces where resources could and should be played with. Mats activate new potential for childrens’ place-space lifeworlds. Place-space matterings result in the mat-territory expanding in multiple ways. In home corners mats subvert gender roles, on wooden floors motorways and airspaces proliferate, adult and children&s;s spaces become queered and confused, and love and care are remade as the heart motif becomes a contradictory space opening up and closing down love and care relationality.