Stitching Connections
Next month an exhibition of stitched work opens at South Square Centre, Thornton. Stitching Connections shows textile work from my community-based and studio practice over the last fifteen years. Projects with Bradford based organisations exploring the heritage of textile dyes and recycling, creative health and the experience of lockdown, speak to a commitment to engaging with subject, communities, and processes over many years. The pieced and stitched work from collaborative projects demonstrate the universal language of textiles and commonalities of experience. My reflective, durational stitch work is informed by listening to and being part of conversations through making around the table tops of Bradford’s many community spaces of care.
Work from projects includes Out There (2010-2013) delivered for Hive, a community arts charity with funding from Mind and National Lottery Community Fund. This was an ecotherapy project, focussed on urban green spaces - community gardens, allotments and growing for creative activities. It was my first experience of setting up community dye gardens, something I went on to write about in my first book, Slow Stitch1. This project led to heritage focussed work, connecting stories from a textile city and its communities and the conversations through heritage connections that came with making activities. The Fabric of Bradford explored 19th century histories of textile dyeing, working with archives from The Society of Dyers and Colourists and community growing spaces. Worn Stories: Material and Memory in Bradford, 1880-20152 used the heritage of textile recycling and repair to connect stories of late nineteenth century rag workers and link them to attitudes to textile consumption today.
More recently Together with needle and thread: Legacies of Louisa Pesel (2022-23) examined and mapped Pesel’s Bradford connections and her work with refugees and soldiers during World War One3. Samplers inspired by this work by project participants and community researchers will be shown for the first time. The Bradford Covid 19 Stitch Journal captures the experience of the first Covid lockdown in 2020 and was made by 30 local women who stitched together online. It was first exhibited in Belgium in 2022 as part of an exhibition Connective Material curated for Museum Dr Guislain as part of an international conference Culture and Mental Health. I’m pleased that it will finally be seen in Bradford where the participants were based.
Revisiting this work and gathering it together from various locations has been an interesting and reflective experience. Some of the work has been in storage in my studio and in community centres, there are also pieces that have not yet been exhibited or are exhibited for the first time in the UK. I was reminded of a paper by Emma Shercliff at the first Textile and Place conference in Manchester, about the afterlife of community textile projects4. Finding homes for objects after projects finish is not always easy, and over time priorities for community organisations can change. Finished collaborative textiles are process driven things. Work often takes place over long periods of time and it can be difficult to convey the other kinds of work that happens as they are made. This can include everything from sharing community rooms with groups doing other things and improvised materials and techniques adapted to particular buildings, to the conversations that emerge when stitching together.
Showing process driven stitch work from my personal practice alongside these pieces work links my studio, research and community-based practice. Stitch Journal (2013-23), my ten years of daily hand stitching, ‘… a record of days, but not a daily record’5 will be exhibited for the first time. Eight metres of stitching was made alongside community projects and my PhD research. Through this repetitive work I tried to make sense of my thinking about work and life through a colourful chaos of threads, knots, overlaps, interruptions.
Stitching Connections is at South Square Centre 1st November 2024 - 5th January 2025. Opening evening and artist talk 5-8pm.
Workshop in the gallery Saturday 7th December 11-4pm
Wellesley-Smith, C (2015) Slow Stitch: Mindful and Contemplative Textile Art. London: Batsford
Worn Stories: Material and memory in Bradford 1880-2015 supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Project publication. Project publication
Together with Needle and Thread: Legacies of Louisa Pesel supported by a Culture and Heritage grant from Bradford Metropolitan District Council. Project publication
Shercliff, E. Materiality in storage: the aftermath of site-specific collectively made textiles (2018), presented at Textile and Place, Manchester Metropolitan University, The Whitworth,
http://www.clairewellesleysmith.co.uk/blog/2023/4/30/a-decade-in-stitches