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Cloth and Culture NOW. Curated by Lesley Millar (MBE), the exhibition Cloth and Culture NOW included the work of 35 contemporary textile artists from Estonia, Finland, Japan, Latvia, Lituania and the UK, with the aim of exploring links between traditional and contemporary textile practice and wider overlapping global influences. In each of these countries textiles have traditionally played a central role, both economically and also as a carrier of the narrative of place. And in each of these countries, contemporary textile artists are using that embedded narrative of traditional practice within the discourse surrounding their practice. The inclusion of my own work Surface to Surface Correspondence ref:962/398 followed an invitation to be one of 6 artists representing the UK. An accompanying 180 page publication contains extracts from in depth interviews conducted by Millar with the artists throughout the length of the project. The website contains personal statements from all the artists about the project thesis. An accompanying education programme provided a site for discussion and the exchange of ideas in relation to cultural identity and cross-cultural/trans-national influence.

Invitation to be one of 6 artists representing the UK in Cloth and Culture NOW provided the opportunity to develop research which explores our bodily engagement with space and the agency of textile in negotiating this relationship. Particular concerns within this project included the way that textile operates as a ‘silent witness’ to our repetitive routines providing an ambiguous boundary between self and ‘not self’ and the importance of tactility and the continuity of touch in this relationship.

Whereas earlier research had addressed gestures of the hand and localised touch, studio enquiry for this project considered less focused touch, not limited to static contact between fingertips and surface but, like textile’s corresponding organ of skin, dispersed throughout the body. Continuing to subvert modernist tropes through which textile had traditionally been marginalised, the practice explored minimal forms which had abstract ‘neutrality’ but which also referenced the real world of function and utility. The ubiquitous pads and panels that unconsciously dictate the movement of the body and constitute the non-spaces of our built environment provided a visual and conceptual reference for the work. Countering the subjective potency that is the focus of much textile research, the upholstered panels of our transport system and corporate furniture provide a more detached stage set for the repetitive routines of our busy lives, silently soaking up the clamour of activity in their dense absorbent surfaces. These unconscious patterns of behaviour are echoed through the invisibly laborious repetitive process of counted-thread embroidery used to create the densely worked ‘antimacassar’ covers which reference the woven moquette developed specifically for the transport industry and the legacies of textile within our industrial and cultural heritage.

An invitation to be included in the first Textile Reader, published by Berg, presented an opportunity to document the research that informed this work.