Craft Research - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2015

Textiles touch all our lives – from the cradle to the grave – and serve increasingly diverse purposes. Historically, and as one of the first industrialized commodities, the skill and knowledge required to construct fabrics to clothe and furnish has dominated cultures worldwide. Contemporary Japanese textile design draws on countless traditions of often ancient but sustained craft practices. These traditions both respond to and employ the natural condition of things, exercising heightened and honed sensibilities to material know-how. Discussed through the discipline of woven textiles and, in particular, ‘traditional’ Japanese production systems, this article seeks to identify the location and distribution of both practical and aesthetic expertise in textile making and its transferable value for contemporary practices. The article presents case studies of surviving vernacular ‘cottage’ industries, where highly organized systems of knowledge exchange, spanning agricultural fibre production to direct technical instruction in thread making, ensure effective engagement with and ‘management’ of very specific materiality. The notion of intangible cultural property will be discussed in the context of inherited knowledge and how traditional social hierarchies and knowledge systems have served to nurture and perpetuate the sharing of skills and understanding through generations of textile makers and making.

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 distinctive 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.

Feminist legacies of the handmade are visible through the rhetoric of the material archive. For a textile practitioner this might traditionally have been through the creation of the sampler, a physical display created to demonstrate the technical skill or creative prowess of the maker. The voices of hidden textile practices might also be revealed by oral stories and narratives, which lie dormant in newspaper listings and archives. Other textile legacies are embedded within the modes of transmission of knowledge contained within spaces or other ‘habitus’ that traditionally sit outside the boundaries of more traditional institutional spaces of textile learning. Textiles as objects hold meaning, are related to different aspects of memory and knowledge, and generate significance by and for different social, gendered and cultural groups globally. This article explores how Dorcas Clubs – a charitable organization of philanthropic women formed at the beginning of the nineteenth century – did this through the migratory experience of women, whether through notions of class boundary, physical space or travel. It is argued that Dorcas Societies, through their transformation,

The contemporary fashion system that has been shaped by the global economy provides fast consumables that are the products of a monocultural vision of design. In this system, cultural references, historical and ecological considerations and the notion of quality are ignored. The structure of fast fashion not only perpetuates an identity of women that is homogeneous and deprived of a sense of belonging, but it also creates this identity. Moreover, mechanization and mass production have led to the extinction of a great variety of traditional crafts because the adaptation of pattern, ornament or weaving techniques, indigenous to a particular culture, necessitates simplification for industrial production. In this way they are not only simplified technically, but their cultural meanings are also trivialized. As a result these crafts are no longer passed down to future generations. Disengagement from craft practices causes a cultural misidentification of both consumers and artisans. Placing emphasis on craft culture can prevent the devaluation of these cultural products, especially in economically emerging countries such as Turkey, where a lack of industrialization can become advantageous for the advancement of craft through the integration of local knowledge and labour. This article emphasizes the necessity of institutions, organizations and individuals in the preservation of craft and the handmade. In this regard the Aegean town of Ödemis¸ has been selected as a case study. In 2011, seven women entrepreneurs established Ödemis¸ Women’s Cooperative and built an atelier to support womens’ engagement with crafting. The textiles of Ödemis¸ are the products of a multicultural history. Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, Selcuk, Ottoman and Turkish transitions have intensely affected the production methods of textiles in the region and have created a unique identity. Colouring methods are as old as the Byzantine Empire, and for more than 1000 years silk weaving and crochet have remained the major source of living for the women of Ödemis¸. This article will reveal the relationship between cultural identity and craft, emphasize the impact of women’s craft practice in this context and assess the importance of the atelier as a collaborative workspace.

This project takes the researcher’s established fashion and textile design practice into a new space of the virtual and digital as a context for creative enquiry. Through discussion on two speculative experiments that use motion capture technology, this enquiry considers the transformational potential of a digital materiality as an environment in which to re-imagine and re-image the surfaces of future fashion. Specifically, it asks what influence the virtual/digital environment will have in shaping the aesthetics of the experiments. These acts of transformation, through morphing surfaces and shape-shifting material forms, question contemporary norms of using, consuming, engaging with and understanding fashion and textiles. Enfolded in this creative research is the recognition of how these shifts from matter to metaphor, from object to ephemeral, from dress to transformable interface could ignite alternatives to the current fashion manufacture and consumption process.

This article contributes to an ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between architectural and textile/fashion design. Over the past decade architectural theory has re-engaged with the ideas proposed by Gottfried Semper in the 1850s to explore new definitions of how material practices can be understood and articulated, particularly that architecture can be seen as the concretization of textile form and pattern. The article discusses three iterations of the architectural column, introducing themes of scale, material language, constructional method and formal representation and brings together the body, space, structure, form and ornament. COLUMN 1 is a highly decorated concrete structural version, which is hard throughout, but suggests softness by its reference to textile (armature is sleeve). COLUMN 2 is essentially an architectural garment. It uses seamless purl and plain knitting with ribs at either end. It is a soft tactile textile covering to a hard base (armature and sleeve). COLUMN 3 moves away from visual ornament and explores the structural 3D form of knitted textile. The structure is entirely soft. This iteration opens up possibilities for architectural forms that explore the unique properties of seamless knitting, with its inherent strength and elasticity. There is the potential when the form is soft to challenge a perception that architecture is ‘fixed’ and to develop architectural forms that can, through post-construction processes or smart materiality, later become hard (sleeve is armature). The research brings together through practice architectural and textile/fashion references. Their further development through digital approaches, innovative materiality and construction opens up a craft/design dialogue and interdisciplinary discourse in the exploration and realization of novel textile-informed architecture.

Within the shifting territories of craft practice, the handmade has become a relational form of contemporary activity that transforms our understanding of place through a hands-on, minds-on process of collectivemaking. The conceptual significance of craft is activated through a chance encounter with the handmade in daily life. During the article we aim to explore the confluence between crafting, social engagement, volunteering and the realms of education and creative practice that we have both experienced first hand. What will be revealed will be the voices of practitioners collectively exploring cloth’s potential as a metaphor for consciousness, carrier of narrative and catalyst for community empathy and cohesion. This will be informed by an enquiry into historical forms of communal crafting drawn from archival research at the Imperial War Museum London and Foundling Hospital Collection housed at the Foundling Museum in London and a primary case study of the workshop ‘Desconocida – Unknown – Ukjent’. We employ a method used in object-based research: a value system that can be applied to the consideration of cloth as an object of study – namely, the locational, iconographical, archival, aesthetic and transferral. Focusing particularly on the transferral and locational, we will examine the significance of the handmade gesture in particular artistic, political and social contexts. These visual and textual narratives will inform our perception of ‘Craft in unexpected places’ and bring visibility to a selection of craft interventions by making links between the wide-reaching possibilities for craft-based practices and their expressive potential within the social and political landscapes they inhabit.

This position paper describes the Collection of the Knitting & Crochet Guild (KCG), a UK-based membership organization, and the ways in which engagement and interaction are undertaken within it. The Collection is conceptualized as a repository of the handmade, and therefore of interest and relevance to craft practitioners. First, an outline of the Collection’s history is given including the ways in which items have entered the Collection and shaped its composition. Second, the article describes the ways in which diverse audiences, including KCG members and students, engage with the Collection, both physically and digitally, drawing upon the quality of these interactions taken from visitor feedback and selected student experiences. Third, the status of the Collection as an embodiment of the skill, time and labour of the makers is discussed and the future potential for further interactions from contemporary students and makers.

‘Stitch & Peacock’, the title of this recent exhibition by UK-based American artist Danica Maier, at The Collection and Usher Gallery, Lincoln, alludes equally to the craft, the imagery and the subversive messages hidden in her drawings for this show. The result of a seven month residency by Maier, the exhibition is the latest in a series of invitations to contemporary artists by curator Ashley Gallant to respond to objects held in the archives, as a means of presenting new perspectives on historic artefacts. Maier chose a Jacobean crewel work bedspread and a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century samplers, and by making work in response to these fragile objects, develops a dialogue that allows her to repeat and refract the textiles through the lens of drawing, and to make critical comparisons and equivalences between the stitch, the pixel and the drawn mark. Through her juxtapositions and reworkings, she asks us to reflect on the social context of the original female makers; to speculate on their potentially supressed frustrations, and their subversive power. Her wider drawing practice also critically invokes notions of labour, craft and technology, through her mining of a variety of archives.

Don’t get comfortable: A review of ‘Knitting Nottingham’, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, 6–28 November 2014