Strange and Curious Matters

What a great day was had at the Textiles Symposium Day at Stroud Festival a few weekend ago; loads of stimulation and new ideas to take home. With  so much to take in, a full day of lectures and many speakers, including those below,  one thing stood out loudly – what a strange and curious place is our world of Textiles; everything from plastic surgery to broken spoons and deep fried jumpers, viewpoints re-aligned and brains challenged to aching point.

Jessica Hemmings (Deputy Director of Research at Edinburgh College of Art) writes about textiles, fiction that contains textiles and other people writing about textiles. If she impressed one point upon us, it was the importance of good critical writing; the need for those who do so,  not only to be (or have been) textile practitioners, but also good writers – not so frequent a combination as you would imagine, she said.
She gave one  instance that continues to stick in my mind –  a catalogue produced by the V&A, in which a textile artist (at great pains to herself) had produced a black dress, an installation piece, which described her innermost feelings concerning her recent widowhood. The caption was a line or two making the point that  it was considered lucky for Victorian seamstresses to leave a drop of blood on a garment – true, but totally irrelevant (and insensitive) to quote beside this particular work. It sat awkwardly,  uncomfortably light, beside a very personal and heart rending piece of work. In comparison, to see a really good selection of writings about textiles, have a look at The Textile Reader – recently edited by Hemmings, it contains snippets of some of the most important and influential textile writing produced since the last century. In the Loop: Knitting Now, another of her books, documents major developments within knitting of recent years. Works such as the deep fried jumper (opposite) by Dr Annie Shaw, senior lecturer at Manchester and another speaker on the day (above left with Sharon Blakey right) have changed the face of contemporary art knitting practice completely.
Rhian Solomon is a textile artist inspired by plastic surgery; her work draws on both its techniques and many issues involving self-image. What was surprising, was how much the development of plastic surgery was in debt to techniques from pattern cutting, dressmaking and tailoring. She described for us how the early pioneers of plastic surgery, driven by the pressing needs of warfare injuries during the last century, looked to these techniques to learn how to cut, to piece, to fold and to seam skin together. The photo shows a surgeon’s trial piece, attempting to minimise seaming for maximum benfit to the patient.  An amazing fact and a more recent discovery, is that the skin, like woven fabric, has a definite grain to it – aligning it the right way makes all the difference to successful healing. Solomon works with plastic surgeons, helping them to find new ways to improve surgery techniques, she is equally inspired in reverse,  in terms of ideas feeding into her working textile practice.
Several pairs of speakers talked about their work for the related Pairings II exhibition – held at the adjacent Museum in the Park; all were fascinating, but I was immensely attracted to the poignant tale of the spoons described by ceramacist Sharon Blakey. This refers to an extensive collection formed by a Victorian lady; not valuable themselves as objects, they had gone into the museum (by the back door) simply because her husband left them a more “important” collection of treasures. These were not beautiful, valuable, silver spoons, but common everyday ones. Broken, tarnished and unloved, they had sat hidden away in drawers for the duration. Teamed up with for the collaborative exhibition with weaver Ismini Samanidou, Blakey had made beautiful ceramic spoons which captured the aged, careworn forms of the spoon collection. Samanidou used digital weaving processes amongst others (something Blakey professed herself to be astonished at) to form cloth printed with imagery of the spoons. What was really poignant, were the quotes (taken from old letters found in the boxes with them) digitally printed onto the cloth, telling of people long forgotten, their lives and their tiny, but probably very meaningful and valued possessions. The fact that they were retained, often in pieces and put carefully away, spoke so much.