A UCL / Horniman Museum Workshop funded by the Pasold Fund for Textile Research

Sandy Black, London College of Fashion

Interrogating the New Textiles

This paper concentrates on the intersection of fashion and textiles, focussing on knitwear as a particularly strong hybrid of craft, fashion, art and technology – a spectrum which ranges from both historical and contemporary handcraft and the domestic to highly advanced industrial technologies. All forms of knitting are linked by the same underlying construction technology, but there are social and economic factors which fragment understanding. The recent revival of handknitting with groups like Cast Off has forefronted and rediscovered the community aspects of craft work. This paper interrogates another aspect of the new textiles – the impact of emerging technologies on fibres, fabrics and fashion practices. The paper describes major shifts in the development and use of fabrics and clothing to perform a wide range of functionalities, from military uses to wellbeing and the enhancement of medical care.

Dr Max Carocci, Goldsmiths College London

Textiles of Healing: Native American Aids Quilts

The association between textiles, symbolic art and healing has a long history in anthropology. While fabrics that are considered ‘sacred’ in the broadest sense are found in all cultures and periods, they continue to be central to contemporary life in our own society. This paper deals with the use of quilts and quilting as memorial, therapeutic practice and sacred objects of spiritual healing in connection with AIDS. Quilts have traditionally been used to mark significant passages and stages, such as birth, marriage and death. They have been appropriated by the AIDS movement in the American AIDS Quilt project, the largest textile project in the world, in which quilts are created to commemorate victims of the disease. This paper deals with a special form of quilt, those created by and for Native American AIDS sufferers, which combine traditional motifs and techniques such as beadwork with contemporary symbols such as the red AIDS ribbon, weaving together the politics of health, sexuality and Native American identity.

Professor Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen

Transformations of the Line: Traces, Threads and Surfaces

This paper forms part of a wider comparative exploration of the history and anthropology of the line. I show that in any such exploration, what is at stake is not merely lines themselves, and their production, but the nature of the relation between lines and surfaces. Distinguishing between threads and traces, and drawing on a wide range of ethnographic material dealing with weaving and embroidery as well as calligraphy, I show how traces are transformed into threads in the dissolution of surfaces, and how threads are transformed into traces in their constitution. Whether as a thread or a trace, however, the line is perceived as something that moves and grows. As such, it contrasts with the kind of line that is invoked whenever we speak of the linearisation of thought and practice associated with modernity, which implies neither movement nor growth but the assembly of interconnected elements.

Dr Fiona Kerlogue, Horniman Museum

Transformations through Textile: Textile Production and Use in Rural Cambodia Today

Western accounts of Cambodian life in recent years have been dominated by a concern with the Pol Pot era, drawing a picture of a society still bearing its scars and in which the Khmer Rouge are seen to continue to pose problems for economic development and social cohesion. Following this view, a number of NGOs have set up programmes in the country based on the notion that the production of textiles was brought to a total halt in the years 1970-75 and that external help is needed in order to revive sericulture and the practice of silk weaving in Cambodia. Many of these programmes have set up production with output geared to the tourist market. In this paper I will modify this view by examining the important role played by textiles in Cambodian family and religious life, and show how their significance in these areas has been a key factor in the continuation of traditional practices in both production and use.

Professor Bernd Krauskopf& Dr Hinke Osinga, University of Bristol

Visualising Chaotic Dynamics by Crochet

This paper describes the process by which the traditional textile art of crochet was used to visualise vanguard scientific theory - the famous Lorenz equations that describe the nature of chaotic systems such as the extreme weather and turbulent water movements. This highly complex theory which deals with natural forces that affect us all defied satisfactory representation using even the most advanced computer graphics, until Osinga and Krauskopf realised that the computer-generated model naturally generated crochet instructions. Following them, Osinga crocheted a model of chaos theory that consisted of 25,511 stitches taking 85 hours to complete. The result gave highly important insight into how chaos arises and is organised in systems as diverse as chemical reactions and biological networks, and linked one of the oldest textile arts to the newest technology.

Dr Susanne Kuechler, UCL

Material Embeddings of Technology and the New Face of Innovation

Technologies that are associated with the domestic economy of the Victorian parlour, such as braiding, knitting and embroidery, are finding new uses in the fabrication of fibrous materials that have structural capacities which alone explain the efficacy of the now industrially manufactured object. It is as if a whole generation of engineers and designers were educated with Gottfried Semper’s classic work, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, as manifesto (1878; 2004), translating the functioning capacity of structurally significant objects, often themselves parts of larger wholes, back into textile. Braiding is now again the most basic, but also the most structurally efficient, technique in the manufacture of three-dimensional objects that distribute loads and stresses evenly throughout their structure. Knitting the same fibres creates the opposite characteristic in the form of a stretchable fabric used predominantly in medicine, where knotted and woven surgical devices have been implanted for decades. Most recently, these techniques have begun to be superseded by embroidery, which has the advantage of being a surface technique that allows the placing of threads in any direction, thereby allowing for the imitation of natural fibrous arrays like ligaments. The merging of an inner structure of a fabric, its type of weave and characteristic materiality, with its outer appearance and effect, supporting parts inside the body as well as imitating the actions of the body or its parts, such as contraction or expansion, points up an increasing emphasis upon the surface of the body, its skin, as a material and conceptual referent of innovatory design.

Dr Kaori O'Connor, UCL

Two T-shirts: the Lifeshirt, Medical Chairty T-shirts and the Way People Think about the New Smart Textiles

This paper deals with the social/consumption dimension of the new smart textiles, an aspect that has been largely neglected to date. While the technological capabilities of new fibres and fabrics continues to develop rapidly, their commercial uptake lags far behind, suggesting that the way people think about textiles and clothing has not kept pace with technological change. Although the use of new fabrics and fibres in fashion has received most attention, it is the medical applications of new textile developments that have the potential to improve the health and wellbeing of society generally. By comparing consumer’s attitudes to the Lifeshirt©, a medical monitoring t-shirt that is highly regarded by medical professionals but has a low public profile, with consumer’s attitudes to the popular medical charity t-shirts popular that the public associate with health and medicine although their connection with both is often tenuous, this paper explores the way people think about the two kinds of t-shirts and the textiles they are made of, and suggests ways in which a wider understanding of smart fibres , the new textiles and the public beliefs about health and wellbeing can be achieved.

Dr Graeme Were, UCL

Technologies of the Thread: Why Crochet Works in Tonga

This paper examines thread-based technologies and their relation to maintaining social stability and well-being in regions of social change. It takes as its focus the practice of crochet in Tonga and its widespread uptake by women there. It argues that while scholars have often dwelt on the movement from abstract and geometric art towards figuration and naturalism on bark-cloth as indicative of the impact of social change in the region, such studies tend to overlook the materiality of line and thread in Tongan society. A study of crochet reveals how an understanding of the emergence of such introduced technologies cannot be separated from an understanding of local conceptions of space and time. It draws as illustration on the production of crocheted body wrappers by women to show how Tongan ideas of social distance and relatedness are managed through the creation of the most everyday of things.

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