I booked this conference because it had some wonderful speakers - but ticket prices were extraordinarily high - until I realised if I joined, the subscription as a student was minimal and made the conference mega-cheap!
Lesley Millar. Spoke about her career. Inspired by People & Places; Textiles and Text. Remnant shops to archives.
Key point - be inspired by everything tactile and experiential. Digital inspiration restricts!
Inspiration - look to your cultural background and modernity.
Exploration and experimentation. Research processes and subsequent questions raised.
Craft & Communication. Mould material gathered into end product. Place is important. Right word for right purpose.
Inspiration to work with textiles (even though a Spanish language/history graduate)
Shopping, making and visiting with Mother: handling remnants to feel quality - lead to home dressmaking; nativity plays; museums.
Visit places to understand the context eg Hugh Millar workplace
Exploration and Experimentation
Study with inspiring people
Start speaking
Study in inspiring places
Inspired by making - silk - protectionism in France
Inspired by designing - most designers are anonymous.
Find out what did they design?; what did they use? did they use their own textile designs in their homes (No!).
Inspired by selling
Inspired by diversion (worked with Balenciaga, not her country/time but loved him and what he did).
Inspired by old and new friends - V&A, Palace Reale, Spain
Most of this was about the benefits of 'go out and do'. Visit, travel, look, handle, question, query, talk, learn, reflect. Just what I like to do, but good to hear it reinforced.
Trish Belford, Inspired by ... Linen
William Liddell Archive. The Irish Linen Centre exhibition (with newly published book) extended to January. Liddell damask designs - 1600 glass photo plates. Plan to digitise the collection. Textile images are very difficult to digitise. Colour v difficult. Digitised archives are the entree, not the final point.
Oral history recordings. Invited local family members, former employees of the linen weaving industry in to talk about workplace. They brought in scrapbooks, family stories etc. Led to lots of experimentation in dischargeable and non-dischargeable weave. (Bleaching is part of linen process)
Use the past to inform the future.
Caren Garden. Inspired by ... Words and the power of textiles.
Makes entertaining artworks about challenging issues.
Gained professional development award of Textile Society to explore Eating Disorders. Conducted site visit to derelict hospital in process of being demolished, used to treat ED. Found old key safe - took photos. Idea while walking home. Ordered same model from Ebay. Studied ED conference leaflets. Noted key tags form frame around work. Keys indicated locked in physically and mentally. Colours of plastic key tags emulated BMI colour tagged keys. http://www.carengarfen.com/patients-is-key/.
Used single strands of hair to embroider tiniest writing. Anorexia sufferers writing gets smaller and smaller. Hair indicates fragility, but also repulsion and attraction.
Work evolved from her studies on diet that were shown at Knitting & Stitching Show 2014, when she was emphatic - nothing more about body, shape, diet. Then received email from A level student, studying art and textiles - anorexia sufferer - saying Thank You for enabling her to see herself and her problem. Created further flow of work from Caren. People with anorexia sometimes call themselves 'Anna'/Ana. So Caren made a size zero dress, using black and red stitch. 'Anna' made a pocket to go on the dress - coincidentally stitched in black and red. Caren received it just before Anna killed herself. Still in touch with Anna's mother, made much work about Anna, and exhibited it at 2018 K&S. Anna's mother visited, cried with relief when she saw it - it explained and validated her daughter's suffering.
Lubaina Himid. Never Sleep Inside the Invisible. Reclaiming individual identities hidden by colonisation and politics. http://lubainahimid.uk/portfolio/cotton-global-threads/
Showed Kangas (East African, thin cotton cloth used as a garment by women). Her grandmother always had new kangas, with clever mottos, for weddings and celebrations. Does not wear them herself - she's a jeans and t-shirt person. Believes the kanga is a conversation between women.
Whitworth Textile curators very open and innovative. Maria Balshaw, director, pushed for this.
Kangas in response to Lost Sample Book. Loves sample books, due to her heritage in Manchester. Links between text and pattern - focuses on political, social, economic links.
Interested in theatre design. Likes how you can pull on ropes to move scenery/kangas thereby moving the words in relation to each other.
Interested in audiences. They have their own energy, stories and lives, which varies the interpretation of the story.
Health & Safety notice. Kangas painted on metal. History of African diaspora is totally embedded (and hidden) in the USA. Metal kangas to be mounted, flush with the wall, so you can run your hand over 'the fabric of the building'.
Her motto "always have a plan".
Robert Knifton. Museum Studies, University of Leeds. Using archives differently, to inspire in an inter-generational way.
Helen Storey 1981 to date. Her work had collaboration as a key theme. Textiles as a Trojan horse - that which we welcome into our homes, but may have a hidden message. Much of her stuff was under the bed/in an old henhouse. Archiving creates something new. Digital materiality - something is lost with no physical presence.
Differences between the dusty physical archive, and the digital curation.
Unmediate -v- curating the collection
Archive -v- museum.
Advent of digital access - easier to make links. But physical objects lead to dialogue between people. Experience of making - you need things to go wrong and the experience of handling and materiality is where learning and originality appear.
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