The Generative Loom: Tapestry in the community

The most valuable feature of the concept of culture is the concept of difference, a contrastive rather than a substantive property of certain things. Although the term difference has now taken on a vast set of associations (principally because of the special use of the term by Jacques Derrida and his followers), its main virtue is that it is a useful heuristic that can highlight points of similarity and contrast between all sorts of categories: classes, genders, roles, groups, and nations. When we therefore point to a practice, a distinction, a conception, an object, or an ideology as having a cultural dimension (notice the adjectival use), we stress the idea of situated difference, that is, difference in relation to something local, embodied, and significant. This point can be summarized in the following form: culture is not usefully regarded as a substance but is better regarded as a dimension of phenomena, a dimension that attends to situated and embodied difference. Stressing the dimensionality of culture rather than its substantiality permits our thinking of culture less as a property of individuals and groups and more as a heuristic device that we can use to talk about difference.

2017

Over the last decade interdisciplinary engagement with lace has opened up an emerging space for designers to explore new materials and technologies that question conventional forms of textile making and meaning. The focus of this article is to present contemporary approaches to lacemaking as a creative exploratory response to a local environment. The article will present a textile installation created for the Museum Central de Textile in Lódź, Poland in 2013. Here historical embroidered laces known as punto en aire (translation: 'stitches in the air') will be reimagined as a modern-day place marker. Philosophies of striated and smooth space (Deleuze & Guattari 1988) will explore metaphor through the relationship between language and material structures as a means to move beyond the surface reading of a textile. This article seeks to find original research methodologies for place making in textiles and in doing so present an expanded view of the field.

Art Education, 2019

Contemporary handwork, including all forms of stitching, provides a reflective outlet and is rich in social, cultural, and political history. The desire to connect to the handmade and the tactile through handwork involves practices that enable us to share our humanity and experiences and offer an alternative to the pressures of contemporary life. Through the act of stitching, one can engage in a practice through the senses, seeking to satisfy a deep longing to make space for beauty and creativity, in much the same way people for millennia have come together to spin, weave and sew (Barber, 1995). Like others before us, we, the authors, pick up needle and thread because it is accessible and easily done; the practice providing creative sustenance and informing our research and teaching through the repetitive nature of the act of stitching. One stitch at a time, the authors weave the story of their lives and the lives of those who may equally find the practices as nourishing as it is socially active and historically relevant. Through the exploration of this topic from several positions, including craft as activism and revolution, stitching as renewal, and remembering artists from the past, the authors’ aim is to inform and illuminate the many ways craft has been a part of our social fabric and how the renewed interest in craft and handwork can shape art education.

2019

Fusion Journal, 2020

Despite almost universal participation in textile use, an understanding of the fundamentals of textile construction within the global north appears to be increasingly superficial. The typical person is largely unexposed to the making process of textiles and textile products, as production is outsourced to locations distant from the final user. In recent years, fashion and textile designers have attempted to engage users in their making processes through the use of various supporting media. My intention is not to disregard the production of additional media, but to propose a turn to utilising the textile itself as the site for further user engagement. In this article I reflect on my experiences working with weavers in rural Bangladesh as part of my creative practice and postgraduate research. There, through multisensorial observation, I began to see each 'weaving' (noun/verb) not as a flat thing but as a multidimensional changescape (Gibson vii). Ephemeral moments occurring during the making process were found to materialise within each weaving, acting as a physical record of the spatial, temporal and personal traces of making. Using photography, these traces have been visually amplified in order to involve each weaving in the narration of its own creation.

2016

Making Things Together, the second phase of the project, involved community groups in Birmingham, Dublin and Falmouth, each of which responded to the CARE aims in different ways. The Embroidered Ethnography project in Cornwall was co-created by a group of Falmouth University Mixed Media graduates and staff. It focused on the relationship between embroidery, professional identity, community and education, and stems from the following group concerns: HANNAH MAUGHAN, PROFESSOR FIONA HACKNEY FALMOUTH UNIVERSITY, WOLVERHAMPTON UNIVERSITY This paper explores the group dynamics, narratives, material artefacts and experiential affects of making as they evolved throughout the sessions, and proposes a new form of conceptualizing embroidery as a mode of ethnographic practice. Drawing on relevant histories and theories of amateur and professional making, moreover, it offers a new perspective on how professional identities and practices might be reimagined in an amateur setting.

Craft Research, 2015

The scale and pace of hand-stitching match those of the body, grounding cognitive and emotional experiences of solitude or sociality in a tangible process. The hand–eye–mind coordination required cultivates a distinc- tive form of attention to the self. On the one hand, as a private, contemplative activity, the slow rhythms of hand-stitching allow an individual to carve out time and space for introspective reflection. A collective stitching practice on the other hand, with fragmented tasks of short duration and frequent changes of colour, structures a very different space. In this article I draw on my experiences of joining an embroidery group to explore the simultaneity of social, cultural and physical processes in stitching practices, speech patterns and group dynamics. Finding that embodied knowledge of the craft includes patterns of social and physical interaction – or separation, I propose that hand-stitching practices can suggest alternative ways of thinking about how we create and occupy personal and social spaces.

The Unfamiliar, 2015

This both visual and textual contribution consists of a series of four separate embroideries on textile (Fig. 1, 2, 3, 4), which can be assembled into a unique piece (Fig. 5), and of a text, that engages with a reflection on the overall process of creation with and transformation of a particular daily object: a yarn of golden thread. The contribution has been inspired by the first ‘Walking Threads’ walk and event in Seaton Park, Old Aberdeen, March 2014, from which the ongoing ‘Walking Threads’ project has been initiated. The work is intended as a specific way of ‘thinking through making’ (Ingold 2013) and of further developing the research insights that appeared during and after that walk. In what ways materials, artefacts, skill apprenticeship, gesture, , lines, breathing and the ‘weather-world’ (Ingold 2007a, b, 2015) can relate to each other? It is also a personal attempt to respond to the Ingoldian call towards a ‘Graphic’ Anthropology’, within which ‘to follow the materials, to learn the movements and to draw the lines’ (Ingold 2013) are the main points at the very core of its agenda.

2019

Drawing Light was a research-creation workshop on procedural thinking held in the early evening of a wintery Saturday (10 February 2018) in Montreal, Canada. The workshop was facilitated by Nicole De Brabandere, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, and Alanna Thain, director of the Moving Image Research Lab at McGill, which is devoted to the study of the body in moving image media. Drawing Light emerged from our shared research into gesture as a way to expand on and NECSUS-EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES 190 VOL 8 (2), 2019 explore the encounter between human and nonhuman embodiment in media arts, and in gesture's ability to activate an encounter between abstraction and animation (as technique and as the feeling of aliveness and agency). Through the workshop design, we built a propositional installation ecology that invited twenty participants (largely artists and scholars) to explore gesture at the threshold when actor and spectator, skin and cinematic screen, light and bodily presence coincide and become indistinguishable. Our call for participation invited people to 'join us for an event of reading, drawing, screening and fabulating with light at the edge of visibility and corporeal dimension'. They were asked to prepare in advance by reading short excerpts from key texts on light in media ecologies, to come prepared with a lightemitting device that could also capture moving images and sounds, and to think about how to respond to our prompt asking them to imagine practices where 'illumination is no longer reducible to the invisible and the visible, but an affectively charged relation between transparency and opacity, inside and outside, reflection and absorption, capture and dispersal'. We anticipated that all participants would bring their corporeal and conceptual memories of inhabiting the light gestures of cinema and electronic screens, from the careful negotiations of not blocking the projector's beam while moving around a darkened cinema, to the repopulating of darkened spaces of attention with the small glows of mobile phones, to feeling the collapse and chasm between projection and the landing site of the screen in the cinema versus the flat spaces of laptop, television, and phone surfaces. Through a free play with materials and several directed exercises, participants both engaged, activated, and were moved by a light ecology that drew on and exceeded memory, material, and mediums. The workshop took place at Studio 303, a large dance studio in downtown Montreal. We chose this space for its large floor to ceiling windows on two sides. In the three hours of the workshop the space moved from being fully lit by outdoor light to only artificial light, making the temporal modulation of light gestures a natural and unnatural part of the workshop materials. We opened with a short reading session, samples of theoretical texts provided to participants in advance at the intersection of cinema, light, and embodiment. These were excerpts of texts from Édouard Glissant, Akira Lippit, Alanna Thain, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Erin Mouré, and A.H. Church.[1] Reading together, we sought to identify propositions that could be mobilised in the workshop in the procedural context of 'drawing light'. Reading Church, for instance, we considered colour as a material quality beyond the visual, such DRAWING LIGHT DE BRABANDERE & THAIN 191 as when the threshold between red and infra-red gives way to warmth or intense saturation. Similarly, Tanizaki's descriptions of shadows that fill the room with pools and rivers of 'thin, impalpable, faltering light'[2] attuned us to thinking with and perceiving the threshold of form and shadow as the light faded over the course of the event. In this essay, we expand on these propositions and identify new ones that the workshop brought into focus for us. After reading the texts, the participants discussed how to draw actionable practices from them, in order to activate the workshop ecology. This was fol

Junctures-the Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 2004

Encircling a form allows the milliner to experience the many shapes, undulations and silhouettes of a piece. The ability to perform this in sketchbook mode in a virtual environment allows the designer to explore ideas more fully and interactively. Engaging in the bodily experience of designing for, and then weaving narratives on, computer-assisted jacquard looms is explored in relationship to reading cloth.