I write this shortly ahead of the one-year anniversary of the first national lockdown in the UK. It seems incredible to think how much our lives have changed in such a relatively short time. However, we have all adapted and will adapt again as we are able to emerge from these restrictions.
One of the wonderful benefits of the process of publishing is that of delayed gratification, and it was thus with great delight that I was able to launch my monograph, A Philosophy of Textile: between practice & theory with Bloomsbury in November 2020. This stems from my PhD research and explores the ways in which textile practices and behaviors can drive thinking about textile and ways of building human-human relationships. This might sound somewhat cerebral and involves a fair level of scholarly research. However, all of my thinking and writing is derived directly from the material experience of weaving and stitching into cloth.
I am currently writing a chapter for a book focusing upon the concept of the fray and fraying cloth. I am intrigued by the close detail of the weaving that the fray reveals; who can resist pulling and picking at the loose threads to see how the dye has taken/not taken when denim frays or to see the smooth and crinkled threads pulling away from the fraying edge of satin? I find this intimate exploration and detailed physical examination drives my thinking about how threads and fibers sit together within the woven cloth.
Where I get excited at the minute structures of cloth, philosophers and thinkers have long drawn upon cloth and its production as metaphors for culture and cultural organization. It is not surprising given most industrial cultures have cloth production at their roots, so the social fabric of life is both a literal and metaphorical concept.
For me, researching, writing and making textile works form a seamless set of activities and pre-occupations. To form a text is like stitching and weaving: as the needle and thread pass to and fro, it draws thread and cloth into closer proximity with each other; they wrap around each other, and in the space of exchange new meaning is formed. My research becomes a meditation upon these threads, it is often poetic in its form, performed as well as read, it sits in the spaces between language and materiality, where both fray and lean towards one another. Where one runs out of capacity, the other feeds through and together meaning can be made and expressed.
This mutual exchange of meaning and expression becomes metaphors and models, drawing from textile practices and behaviors, for what it means to be a transnational community. How do we shift and share space with one another physically, economically, and culturally? What can a woven cloth, with all of its global histories and economies of power, speak of in terms of different ways of being with one another?
A member of the 62 Group in the UK, Dr. Catherine Dormor is a practicing artist, researcher, and lecturer. She serves as the Head of Research Programmes at the Royal College of Art.
Dr. Dormor’s recently published book A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory
Visit the Research Biennale 2021: a showcase of Phd/MPhil/MRes research across the RCA
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