The architecture of a fibre is like that of the DNA this shows reflective and experiential process in tension,
Just produced a book which is an inspirational story of how creativity can help you rise above the everday problems of life. Attached is a picture of my front cover, my story is told through my hats. www.2QT.co.uk/blog or www.toneredgar.com go to the about page to purchase the book.
After the meeting today I thought some more about the material culture of our textile work: the specific tools we have and the way in which we use them.
What do they reveal about our values and attitudes? Are they part of the construction of personal identity? Certainly some of my tools are very personal items. Some are survivors from the past, and exhibit their previous owner’s care for things hard come by. Through their patina of use they provide a model of authentic experience that connects me to other textile workers.
As a tapestry weaver, I now use a frame loom that I made so that it could be dismantled for travelling to a course in Italy with Lynne Curran. That frame continues now to be the one I use as for me it is invested with knowledge gained through Lynne’s teaching. Through Lynne’s generosity I acquired an historic vertical loom, once used by Lynne herself and before that by Sax Shaw, one time director of the Edinburgh Tapestry Company. I had not known Sax’s work, but researching his career as an artist has brought me into contact with a body of work and a philosophy of working that has informed my own developing sensibility of what it is to be a weaver. Warping it up became an act of continuity and connection. Learning its codes and language provided essential tools for thought about tapestry weaving and how it has been practised.
Thought I’d share a wonderful book with you all - ‘Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain‘, by Roger Deakin,1999.
It is a travel book by a swimmer who swims his way across Britain-
in moats, lochs, ponds, streams, the sea,fens, swimming pools and canals. He looks at history, ecology, natural science, native swimmers’ rights and more, with great humanity and wit. An uplifting book that will appeal to all swimmers (Annie and Valerie take note). Available through the public library system. Connection with ‘Nets’? The other side of being “netted”- swimming freely with a wild spirit!
This is possibly my finished work. It is an altered book, using pages from the text for the net, which flows out of the bottom of the book. The net is also a river and fish.
Hats by Edward Mann
I felt this image applied to the darker side of nets. I felt it was a good metaphor for filtering language. An exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum explored how fashion was shaped by the Cold War. The technological preoccupation of the period perhaps continues today with the use of firewalls.
I did have trouble putting this image up that I had scanned but after helping Wendy at the Sunday workshop realised I had saved it as a Word document rather than a jpeg.
The capacity of language to order and control the chaotic disparate material of human life is what I think about. Nets, weaving and webs have become metaphors for language’s ordering system.
These images are drawn out of the peculiar literary world of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: a book whose unconventional language and structure leans paradoxically towards disorder and the disintegration of language.
hardly holds
226631 wakewords, Nicci Haynes, 2009
