Output details

Cloth and Memory {2}. Cloth and Memory {2} is a site-specific exhibition located in the UNESCO World Heritage Site: Salts Mill, Saltaire, Yorkshire, UK, which is also an anchor point in the European Route of Industrial Heritage. The exhibition took place in the original Spinning Room (known as The Lobby) not usually open to the public which, at 168m x 16m, when first built was thought to be the largest industrial room in the world. The inclusion of my own installation, Mutable Frame of Reference, arose out of my research and followed an invitation from the lead curator Lesley Millar (MBE). An international group of artists were invited to visit Salts Mill in order to propose work as a response to the site. From these proposals 23 artists were selected: 14 from the UK, 7 from Japan, 1 from Germany, 1 from Norway, representing emerging, early career and established artists. An accompanying 119 page publication, website, and education programme provided a site for discussion and the exchange of ideas about the relation between cloth and memory.

Extending earlier research, ‘Cloth and Memory’ provided an opportunity for reflection on models of subjectivity and the processes of attachment and detachment that are problematised through the intermediary agency of textile in relation to the framing (and reframing) of memory and heritage.

Key points of reference that informed the research and development of the studio enquiry are tensions between stasis/mobility, proximity/distance, stability/instability that are potentially evoked through the experiential encounter. Arguably, these paradoxical conditions are fundamental to the constitution of the precarious modern subject and particularly evident in the workings of heritage and memory. They are also the founding contradictions of cloth, which arguably functions as an exemplary metaphor and medium through which to articulate the complex mutability of our contemporary existence.

Drawing on Briony Fer’s analysis of the paradoxical subjective encounter evoked through the installational tableau, my intention for the exhibition was to establish a correspondence between more rigid structural frameworks and movable curtains that offer a variety of perspectival positions and a series of continually fluctuating frames. Staged within these structural frameworks are smaller elements that ambiguously reference the history of Salts Mill and textile production as well as the wider everyday functional and social conventions of textile through which we physically and psychologically negotiate our relationship with the world.

Offering a succession of fragmented tableaux, the aim is to maintain a productive tension between subjective attachment and detachment. On the one hand, the hope is to entice the viewer and evoke a heightened sensory awareness through the affective material sensuality and associative resonances of the work. Yet at the same time that the work facilitates a process of connectivity, the intention is to unsettle seeming stability through the staged artifice, semantic ambiguity, and fluctuating frameworks that physically and psychologically distance the viewer and resist subjective cohesion.