Category: Article

FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee’s Bend

With a population today of just 275 people, Gee’s Bend is a small, isolated hamlet with a complex history. Surrounded on three sides by the Alabama river, it was once a cotton plantation, originally established by Joseph Gee and then later owned by Mark Pettway. As direct descendants of the slaves and subsequent sharecroppers who worked on the land throughout the 19th and 20th Century, the majority of those who live in Gee’s Bend continue to share the Pettway name.[1]

… Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee’s Bend
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

Teaching Craft: a Silversmith’s Story

There are many aspects that one takes for granted when you’re a craftsperson. Drawing myself back to my first days holding a saw or understanding how pliers work, to the more complicated matter of how silver reacts under hammer and fire, I appreciate something that now comes naturally to me, but may not necessarily for others. I take care not to do the work for my students, using words to convey what to do. Sometimes it’s not easy with a craft that’s so tacit and engrained. 

… Teaching Craft: a Silversmith’s Story
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

“Embroidery is integral to our being”: the role of Arabic tatreez in knowing who you are and where you are from

Embroidery is about making visible. It is the adornment of cloth to add meaning and value. As such, it is about identity – making a claim about who you are, and displaying that for others to see. This is both personal and political, and nowhere is this more true than in the modern Middle East.

… “Embroidery is integral to our being”: the role of Arabic tatreez in knowing who you are and where you are from
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

An Epistemics of Touch: The Conglomerate Tactile Trash Object Project

Touch has made its way into our everyday turns of phrase; it has dissolved into our vocabulary, the way we relate to the world around us. Both in this abstract sense and literally, often in the form of banal and daily gestures, touch is an invisible and inescapable part of our day-to-day. Such is the ubiquity of touch that we can choose to ignore its importance, until it is brought into question.

… An Epistemics of Touch: The Conglomerate Tactile Trash Object Project
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen textiles

“Put your hand up if you’re wearing something knitted!” 

Figures 1 and 2. Elinor at a Homemade knitting machine workshop for children. Image: Elnaz Yazdani 

Are you wearing something knitted today? Given the broad array of knitted fabrics on the market and the recent lockdown trend for comfort dressing, we’d say it’s very likely – but did you know your clothes were knitted? We have been involved with either teaching about or creating knitting on knitting machines for over 15 years and we often forget that once upon a time we didn’t know that so much of our clothing was knitted.

… “Put your hand up if you’re wearing something knitted!” 
FeaturedArticle Issue Fourteen

Meet Nilupa Yasmin: the Artist Using Craft and Photography to Weave Together Communities

Nilupa Yasmin in front of a section of her work Grow me a Waterlilly, 2017.

Existing on the tentative line between the mediums of photography and applied craft, lens-based artist and educator Nilupa Yasmin’s work is an intricate reconstruction of both art forms. As she pieces together personal stories from the different communities that she encounters, her work is in a constant state of unravelling, where she continues to discover her place within the warp of the world. Focusing on the two strands of community and self, her woven photographic work delicately displays that one cannot exist without the other. 

… Meet Nilupa Yasmin: the Artist Using Craft and Photography to Weave Together Communities
FeaturedArticle Interviews issue thirteen wearable art

Stitching over history, memory and collective joy – Stephanie Francis-Shanahan’s living sculptures

A blazer and a skirt flutter in the wind at Pett Level beach in Hastings. On it are pictures of a man and a woman, across time, sown into the fabric and glazed with glue. Words travel through the garment in embroidery and the pink tulle skirt reads: my own darling (image right). As an image, it presents a ghostly figure, embodied by the movement in the wind and the stories woven into the textile. 

… Stitching over history, memory and collective joy – Stephanie Francis-Shanahan’s living sculptures