writing (stitching) it down

Nine years of (almost) everyday stitching. A tangle of thread on the back, some of the surface threads now beginning to fade, the 10 metres of recycled linen cloth that make up my Stitch Journal. My choices of thread connect my thinking through community and studio practice and daily life.

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I’ve been thinking about stitching and writing again as I come to the end of five years of PhD research with the Open University. I’ve been looking in granular detail at socially engaged arts practices and how they work when exploring specific aspects of textile heritage. This is an ethnographic study of the growing, making, unmaking and remaking of projects, situated in ordinary places.

The small needle-woven squares now littering the surface of my cloth echo the painstaking process of editing my work. Short ends of threads, clipped from other stitching and saved over time are woven back in. Adrienne Rich describes, ‘Looking back and seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction’ (1972, p.18). My margin notes to myself suggest that I ‘unpick’ a paragraph; neon thread highlights a sentence or a single word.

I want my words to be as precise as my needle.

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Rich, A. (1972) When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision College English Vol. 34, No. 1, Women, Writing and Teaching (Oct., 1972), pp. 18-30 

Responses in stitch

Participants in the Bradford Covid-19 Stitch Journal have responded to their experience of lockdown using one stitched word, a few of which are shown in this post. As the project has progressed some strong themes have emerged through our online meetings and in written responses from the group. The group is made up of 27 women and we all live in the same geographical area but the clearest thing for me is that everyone is having a very different experience of this crisis. Another recurring theme is around the tactility of textile and the feeling that something is missing when we are unable to handle, look closely at and share our work around a table. A participant commented, ‘I miss the handle of fabric - of other people's work. That just doesn't come across in visual-only media.’

I asked the group to describe how they felt when stitching their chosen word and share some of the responses here:

‘Engaged in a thought and creative process. I have felt a range of emotions both positive and negative and the process helped me to realise and think about what I felt was important.’

‘I thought long about my choice of word. There are probably far more negative words to choose from but when I decided on Grateful I realised that it gave me a very strong good feeling and brought me out of any negative feeling that I might be experiencing.’

‘I felt pleased to be asked this question. It was easy to choose the word, & it came to me straight away, although I acknowledge that I actually no longer feel that way. Stitching the word was quite cathartic & I was happy to share my feelings.’

‘Thinking of the word made me really focus in on how I was feeling during lockdown. I came up with far more words than I had expected. I was obviously responding to the crisis more emotionally than I had previously thought. So during this process I felt a very tearful and exhausted. However once I'd settled on a word I felt that it gave me some focus so felt more grounded by the end of that activity.’

‘I felt the emotions connected to my word, 'overwhelmed' but it did lift me - somehow I was able to get some perspective and feel as though I was processing my experience and dealing with it in some way by engaging with it and explaining it to others.’

The next stage of the project is underway with participants working on a final larger linen square, a fairly open brief that speaks of their lockdown experience. As a group we are also thinking about how our squares might come together, temporarily or permanently.

Bradford Covid-19 Stitch Journal Project

Most of my projects are with people and communities: how does this work in a time of lockdown and social distancing? In the last few weeks I have been looking at my current projects and considering how creative engagement work can be done ‘together apart’. I’ve written a little about this as part of my long-term artist residency for Super Slow Way. I’ve also been pleased to have been offered a Response grant from Bradford Metropolitan District Council for a short textile project working with adults who live in the district. The Covid-19 Stitch Journal is a textile project for adults who would like to contribute to a quilt that explores their lived experience of the current crisis. The project will include a number of online workshops via Zoom to discuss our experiences of this and the wellbeing benefits that a collective textile project may offer in times of difficulty. These sessions will offer practical textile ideas as well as an opportunity to have conversations with others about personal experiences and strategies during this period of social distancing. I hope that those involved will be able to meet to stitch together later in the year. The textiles made during the project will be exhibited locally (venue tbc)and as part of an international conference, Cultural Heritage for Mental Health Recovery 2, in Belgium this December. The project will also be part of my ongoing research with The Open University.

UPDATE: This project is now part of a network of organisations, artists, and projects - The Quarantine Quilt Project - across the UK that are producing quilts and textile projects in response to Covid-19 and the changes it has brought to people’s lives. So far, participating projects include ours and projects in Devon, Oxford, Cambridge, London, Essex, West Yorkshire, and Derbyshire. Some are inviting participation from anywhere.  The network development is being led by Significant Seams CIC with funding from Arts Council England.

stitch journal - thinking through making

It has been over 5 years since I began my stitch journal an (almost) daily stitching project. Writing about it in 2013  I described it has having 'No rules, no projected outcome. A record of days, but not a daily record.' I also wrote about it in my book as part of an exploration of textiles as a daily practice. Over the years I've continued to stitch, sometimes adding new sections of cloth, sometimes overstitching previously worked areas. My favoured threads are still the ones I dye myself, another way of making a personal place-based connection to the cloth. The cloth as a whole piece is now over two metres long, no longer the portable project it was when I began. On days when I've been evaluating projects, writing funding bids, sitting in meetings and all the other administrative tasks that go into arts project management, I find the simple act of choosing thread and beginning to stitch very restorative. 

2018 has been busy for me with two long-term socially-engaged art projects I coordinate, Local Colour and Worn Stories: Material and Memory in Bradford 1880-2015. This means that I have less time for my own making practice than I would like. However, I am using both projects as fieldwork for my doctoral research project with the Open University. My research is about engagement with textile heritage and asks whether involvement in slow textile projects can craft resilience in post-industrial former textile communities. Alongside my PhD project I have begun a new section of my stitch journal and I am using it as a creative method to chart my research and allow myself a different way of thinking about it. I find that these wandering stitches are helping to embed my thinking as I work, a way of thinking-through-making. I am planning to continue to chart the course of my studies this way, using my stitch journal as an ‘embodied and open-ended investigation’ (Shields, 2013, p. 30).  

I regularly post images of my stitch journal in progress on my instagram account alongside updates from my other projects. It is also very inspiring to see other examples of textile journals and daily textile practice there. 

 

worn stories: material and memory in bradford 1880-2015

I've recently started work on a new project for Hive, a community arts charity based here in Bradford.  “Worn Stories” is a two year project that will explore the heritage of textile reuse and second hand textiles in Bradford from 1880-2015. It is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The project will link past and present, identifying, interpreting and recording personal and community memories of arrival and belonging through stories of cloth. I'll be working with diverse groups from across the community who will develop research skills, learn about heritage through engagement in dedicated learning programmes within their own communities and share skills and experiences with others around the city. The project will reference the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit interviews of textile workers collected in the 1980s. I'm hoping that the project will offer an opportunity to have conversations about community ownership of textile recycling and reuse in the city and that this might have longer term impacts in reducing textile waste. We'll be encouraging interaction between communities and offering ongoing opportunities to relate the heritage of recycling to modern day practices. The community and volunteer led research from this project will result in the production of creative interpretive work for permanent display, digital online resources and a network of local textile recycling hubs for use in other communities and projects. Towards the end of the project we'll be having a conference that addresses some of the themes and will offer an opportunity for the communities involved to showcase some of their work. There is a project blog that will record the progress of the project as it develops if you are interested in finding out more.

[Images (clockwise from top left): baled textile waste to be made into Flock and wiper cloths, Randisi Textiles, Bradford; Rag waste in various forms from a Bradford paper mill, (image courtesy of Carolyn Mendelsohn); Unfinished patchwork with papers intact c.1880; my travelling scrap bag, used in many community projects over the years with fabric contributions from many participants and many projects.]

:: this project and my current residency are keeping me very busy. However, Hannah Lamb and I have been working towards the second stage of our Lasting Impressions project and this will be exhibited in the Spinning Room in Salts Mill as part of Saltaire Arts Trail this May. There will be another opportunity to see the work when it is exhibited in The Dye House Gallery, Bradford in July. I'll post more information about this soon.

madder root and gatty red

I am currently at the start of an eight month residency, ‘Local Colour’, based in Accrington, Lancashire, commissioned by Super Slow Way. This is a new commissioning body funded through Arts Council England as part of their Creative People and Places funding stream. It is hosted by the Canal and River Trust. A programme of work with local, national and international artists is being delivered in a series of commissioned and community-based residencies focussed on the bicentenary of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. ‘Local Colour’ is based at Elmfield Hall (c.1853) the former home of a textile industrialist, Albert Gatty, who specialised in Turkey Red print and dye techniques and who later became an innovator in the creation of a mineral khaki dye for use in army uniforms. The house is now the base of a social enterprise, Community Solutions North West, an organisation specialising in community engagement and support for vulnerable adults. 

Pictured (top left) is the interior of a small private dye house that Gatty had built next to his house where he could conduct his experiments. It has been virtually untouched since the late nineteenth century.  The project proposes to use a slow methodology to explore historical connections to the area around Elmfield Hall using ‘whole process’ working: seed-to-fabric projects where participants engage in activities that have a localised approach. The focus will partly be around the use of madder in Turkey Red printing. In the context of this durational project the creative processes of talking and making, or conversations through making, will be used to explore Elmfield Hall and its environs. In my proposal for the residency I quoted Lucy Lippard who describes ‘…a layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It’s about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.’ (2007, p.7). I'll report back on our progress as the project develops.

:: My engagement with this blog has been sporadic to say the least in 2016. It's been a very busy year for me and has included some big changes and challenges. I'm planning to write another blog post soon with some information about a new long term project, my PhD research, an update about Lasting Impressions and workshop and exhibition news. Many thanks for continuing to support my work, for reading my book and for visiting my Instagram feed this year. It is very much appreciated.