Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2023

Abstract

It is a great pleasure to be invited to provide a keynote lecture for the Hangzhou Triennial 2022, and I would like to thank all the organisers, and especially Dr Jia Xu of the China Academy of Art, for their kind invitation and technical support in making it possible to be with you from a distance, using the greatest textile network – the world wide web of cosmic, digital and technical interconnection – to enable this communication.

This triennial is concerned with the dynamic relationships between text, texture, culture and civilization as they play out across time, geography, materiality and humanity. The ubiquity and significance of textiles in their very widest form cannot be overstated in our shared human culture, with cloth, fabric, clothing, thread, fibre, yarn, skin and even hair part of us literally from cradle to grave. As well as the actual phenomenon of textile, the metaphorical, critical, historical and imaginative deployment of textile allows huge opportunity for rich and inspired thinking, contemplation, reflection, engagement, participation, intervention, and further creative production.

This paper seeks to trace a research-weaver’s knotted thread through the non-linear text I have created to examine my selected creative and primary sources in textile culture, that is, the ideas and emotions that inform my labour of both word-smithing and materials practice. My starting point is French philosopher Michel Serres’ assertion that “fabrics, textiles and material provide excellent models of knowledge” with “pure touch giv[ing] access to information, a soft correlate of what was once called the intellect”. Serres gives permission for the senses – namely that of touch in particular – to provide an alternative model to intellectual examination of the world. I contend that textiles enable a specific approach that combines bother the sensual and cerebral in understanding the ‘things’ that both surround us and make us. Knowledge of textiles is not only located in the texts of textiles, but in the materiality and the narration of textiles, requiring interrogation through sound, smell, taste, memory, touch and scholarship to unlock deep meaning. The Irish poet, William Butler Yeats captured the narrative of cloth perfectly when he wrote in 1899:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet:
 But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
 I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams [Yeats: 1899].

Comments

This paper was presented as a keynote for 4th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art International Conference, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou, China in December 2022. It was subsequently published in the Textile Reader (4th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, Zhejiang Art Museum, China, 2022), Chinese and English, 2023.

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