outing

It has been a very frustrating week. I’ve not been up to anything much, and have been unable to go outdoors. Tom decided to cheer me up with a non-taxing outing, and we drove to Hawick. I love to walk in the Borders, but when one cannot walk, pootling around in the car will do just fine. In a curious way, the landscape reminds me of home (Lancashire) with its hedgerows, its dry stone walls. By this, of course, I mean that what is familiar to me is the way that the land is parcelled up — the way that property and productivity are visible in it — and in this sense the steep valleys, the mill buildings, the nineteenth-century workers’ housing, are very familiar to me as well. Like Lancashire, this is textile country. What industry remains — in the brand-led processing of luxury yarns — is a mere vestige of what it once was, and yet the past inspires a tremendous amount of local pride. This is very evident in the new Borders Textile Towerhouse, which has recently opened, and is well worth a visit. The building (a restored sixteenth-century fortified tower) is truly fabulous, and the historical exhibits are thoughtfully and carefully put together. I liked the wheels, frames, and looms. . .

. . . and you can’t go wrong with a Trade Union Banner — particularly one that depicts and celebrates the stocking frame.

Tom inspected some knitwear. . .

. . . found himself a new bonnet.

and pondered the practicality of the kilt combinations.

Upstairs, there was an exhibit exploring the ‘future’ of Borders’ textiles, which largely focused on golf sweaters, and Vivienne Westwood. Now, the sweaters aren’t really my thing, but I will say (having examined them carefully) that they were beautifully designed and exceptionally well-made. However, I was so disappointed to encounter berloody Westwood, yet again. However hard one tries, one just can’t get away from her! I can think of several other exhibitions in several other Scottish institutions, all of which explore the past and future of Scottish textiles — and all of which conclude with some obligatory tartan / argyle / tweedy gubbins designed by Westwood. Whether or not one wants the ‘future’ of Scottish textiles to look like Westwood’s parodic aristocratic costumes, one certainly has to question whether Scotland really wants to celebrate a designer whose bespoke ‘Scottish’ materials are often not what they purport to be, and whose shameless appropriation of the Harris Tweed Orb has probably done more harm than good. (Yes, you can tell I talked to the weavers of Harris when I was last there). But whatever one thinks of Westwood, to have her represent the future of Borders’ textiles to me suggests a certain paucity of imagination. Over the past few years, I’ve met so many superb independent Scottish weavers, designers, artists, and makers — all of whom are graduates of the Borders’ textile college at Galashiels. Why not devote this fine, new exhibition space to some exciting, contemporary, truly forward-looking and local talent, rather than a hasbeen of metropolitan high fashion?

(spot the difference!)

Invigorated by anti-Westwood feeling, we went outside and bought some Hawick balls for my cough, and I got Tom to take a picture of my new hat.

This is the much-made Sideways Grande Cloche from Laura Irwin’s Boutique Knits. It was a quick knit, but — as I was attempting to manipulate a super-bulky yarn on 5.5 mm needles — not a particularly enjoyable one. I wanted to create a very dense, firm fabric — and it is certainly that. Following Mel and Sarah’s advice, I cast on 27 stitches (rather than the 45 recommended), and made several knitterly modifications to a suprisingly non-knitterly pattern (casting on provisionally; joining the brim with 3 needle bind off; knitting the crown in the round &c). I won’t be making another one of these in a hurry, but this is a very jolly hat, that goes well with a jolly coat, and which I can hide my non-jolly flu-ridden phiz in. It is ravelled here.

in with the new

After the conclusion of my clothing-myself project in 2008, I have a new project for 2009.

I think that most things are seen better when seen from on foot, and I am often struck by just how much more atuned one becomes to the changing uses and meanings of a landscape when walking through it. Walking radically changes one’s sense of place. For example, when I walked from the West to the East coast of Northern England in 2006, I became very aware (as I passed fishing ports, and slate quarries, and leadmines, and sheep pasture, and reservoirs, and grouse-filled moors) that I was moving through the landscape’s many different economies, sometimes encountering the relics of old economies as well. I noted the shifting geology and ecology of the ground under my feet, and began to look at hills and valleys in a completely different way. I developed a fondness for limestone and an antipathy to bracken.

Loch Uigedail circuit. January 8th, 2009. 7 miles.

Though one is perhaps less concerned with geology in an urban landscape, similar things can be said about walking in towns and cities. Walking allows the walker to really read an urban space — to encounter corners and ginnels, neighbourhoods and the boundaries of neighbourhoods — in a way that is completely impossible in a private car or from public transport. On foot, you can seek out and be party to a city’s particular vernacular.

January 2nd, 2009. Post Hogmanay crowds, Edinburgh. 3 miles.

I have long been intrigued by peripatetic projects — for example, Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space, or Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital — and this year seemed like a good time to pursue one of my own. There are downsides to commuting, but one of the good things about it is the four daily walking miles I can clock up, as well as the many amazing things that I see on my way. My weekends often involve walking in more remote locations, but I am most interested, I think, in the ordinariness of walking — in walking as a daily, quotidian activity. Anyway, armed with podometer and camera, I intend to document a year as a pedestrian.

January 4th, 2009. Kilchoman – Kilchiaran circuit. 4 miles.

I’ll be keeping the visual record over on flickr, but will certainly be making remarks about the progress of the project here from time to time. Meantime, here’s a taste of the project’s beginning, and some walks from the first couple of weeks of 2009.

January 5th, 2009 Bunnahabhain, 2 miles.

January 9th, 2009. Goatopia. 5 miles.

January 18th, 2009. Pickled eggs (after seeing Charles Avery’s The Islanders: An Introduction). 6 miles.

Henry Moore Textiles

It has been a very busy week! But one of its real highlights was visiting the newly refurbished Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh with my friend Melanie, and seeing their superb exhibition of Henry Moore’s textiles. Looking at his designs, and the 1940s upholstery and clothing fashioned from them, I got about as excited as I’ve ever been in an exhibition space. I’ve been thinking about, and experimenting with, fabric printing, and Moore’s notebooks and swatches made me consider process in a very different way. And his designs — structural, energetic, and surprisingly colourful — are also wonderful, democratic works of art.

(Barbed wire. Ascher c.1946. © Henry Moore Foundation.)

Moore’s little-known textile designs really capture his socialist principles. For he felt that art should also be the everyday, might be appreciated by all, and could enrich everyone’s experience of both domestic and public space. Many of his designs feature abstractions of the small wonders of industrial design — the humble safety pin, for example — and celebrate modern daily life in a manner both exuberant and idiosyncratic.

(Treble clef, Zigzag, and Oval Safety Pins. Ascher 1946-7. Ascher Collection. © Henry Moore Foundation)

Moore produced many of these textiles for Czech exile Zika Ascher when war-time travel restrictions separated him from work on his large sculptures. Though the scale and medium of the designs could not be further from that of Moore’s enormous bronzes, the particular techniques he used, as well as the repeating motifs on Ascher’s finished rayon fabric, show a highly sculptural approach to form.

(Family Group. Bronze Maquette and headscarf. 1945. Photograph Matt Pia. © Henry Moore Foundation)

Moore used a combination of wax crayons, pen and ink, gouache, and different watercolour washes to draw out and highlight his designs. The finished effect, when transferred by Ascher into screen-printed motifs, is full of depth and texture. Both Melanie and I were transfixed by Moore’s Family Group design, which was displayed alongside his familiar bronze maquette. Seen separately, the various motifs each seemed to convey a slightly different visual approach to the bronze’s organic forms. But, as images on fabric — repeated motifs busy with light and movement — they also suggest a process of reduction and abstraction that the finished bronze does not convey. This design made me think differently about both screen printing and sculpture.

(Irina Moore making curtains from Moore’s design, “Horses Head and Boomerang.” Photograph E.G Malidine. © Henry Moore Foundation.)

Seeing Moore’s designs being actually worn by women — in the form of neatly tailored dresses and ubiquitous 1940s headscarves — was just amazing. There were also some fantastic domestic interiors, featuring upholstery, bedspreads, and curtains, such as those being sewn by Irina Moore in the photograph above. These fabrics suggested something distinctively modern about both Moore and Britain in the years immediately following the Second World War. In his designs you can read the dogged optimism of the era of the welfare state and the Festival of Britain, as well as the laudable desire to combine high culture with industrial design — to put public art to use in the service of the everyday.

Anita Feldman and Sue Pritchard have produced this book to accompany their wonderfully curated exhibition. I highly recommend it.
See the Henry Moore Foundation website for further information about Moore and the exhibition.

troubled

Needled reviews Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study.
Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Until July 6th.

I like Louise Bourgeois. I like what she stands for. She’s a woman whose early work challenges and outlasts so many of her surrealist contemporaries, with their ludicrous, dick-swinging excesses. I like her investigative, excavatory treament of sexuality and power. I particularly like her beautiful and evocative manuscript-textiles.

(Louise Bourgeois, Hours of the Day (cover), 2006)

Threads of complicity and humour, reproach and chutzpah run through her work. And despite its inward-looking self-scrutiny, what she makes has always seemed to me to be generous and dialogic in character. I can take or leave the psychoanalytic turn some approaches to her art have taken, but I like Louise Bourgeois. So I was really looking forward to the exhibition of her new work at Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens. I visited the exhibition about ten days ago. I’ve been profoundly troubled by it ever since.

In Inverleith House’s tradition of creating conversations between new art and old archives, Bourgeois’ work is set alongside the collections of John Hutton Balfour, one of the Botanic Gardens’ most important early patrons, and a teacher of plant science. Balfour’s teaching aids, notebooks and illustrations were downstairs; Bourgeois’ gouaches and objects upstairs.

It was interesting to see Balfour’s teaching illustrations in the nineteenth-century spaces in which they might actually have been used. But I really wasn’t sure what to make of these three-foot high illustrations. The apparatus of the exhibition didn’t really help much. We were probably told enough about Balfour: his obsession with the economy of nature as evidence of divine workmanship seemed predictable enough. But these were just enormous teaching aids. It was like being in an undergraduate powerpoint lecture illustrated with (even by nineteenth-century standards) really bad slides.

I was at the exhibition with a biologist. He was mildly interested by the approach to scientific inquiry and pedagogy that Balfour’s illustrations evidenced, but felt that most other people at the exhibition wouldn’t really be concerned with this at all. “People just like the way this stuff looks,” he said, “like the way that old microscope slides are reproduced with a sort of empty fascination all over the internet. People say, ooh, that’s pretty, but don’t really ask why they like looking at hundred year-old insects”

I confess that I do like looking at such things, but I also like thinking about the why of that looking as well. Unlike my biologist friend, I believe it’s possible to regard such things not just as generic scientific ‘curiosities’ but as objects that are aesthetic and critical and contextualised (such as in the work of this talented designer, whose ‘creature series’ displays a careful reverence for the historic traditions of scientific illustration, as well as capturing the essential melancholy of the scrutinised object.)

But the thing was that Balfour’s illustrations didn’t invite this kind of looking. Rather than being (like other botanical images of their era) careful or critical or questioning, they seemed crude, expository, brazen, even. And I was completely bamboozled by what kind of relationship I was meant to conceive between these giant didactic images—whose sole purpose was instruction—and the art of Louise Bourgeois.

(Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait (detail), 2007. Photograph Chris Burke. Courtesy Cheim & Read.)

Upstairs, the walls were awash with delicate puce daubs. Breasts multiplied in bloody repetition. This was vintage Bourgeois. These new gouaches respond, like so much of her work, to human parts and parting: separation, integrity, abjection. Femininity appears in these images as a something that’s in process—a process as disturbingly repetitive and perpetual as Psyches tasks. Bleeding, feeding, replicating—constantly iterating and re-iterating. Bourgeois’ gouaches also display her characteristic ability to shape-shift through several subject positions, using the natural transitions that a series of repetitive images provides (here most obviously between the positions of greedy, needy mother and child). And the formal quality of these gouaches—bright pink smears that are loud and fleeting, almost rowdy—add to the sense of impermanence and questioning and process in the work.

But why oh why were Bourgeois’ gouaches exhibited alongside Balfour’s teaching aids? What sorts of ways did the curators imagine that these two sets of incredibly different ‘nature studies’ speak to each other? There was no conversation or connection that I could see at all, apart from the obvious inference that the sexual parts of plants and women are, um, a bit like each other. Surely this unbelievably crass association between femininity and flowers couldn’t be what was meant here? And it wasn’t just that the two sets of images were dissimilar, but that they were produced in such completely different discursive contexts, at very different moments, for completely different purposes, and addressed to totally different kinds of audience. What was to be gained from their contiguity? This question bothered me the whole time I was looking at Bourgeois’ work. It has bothered me since. In fact, puzzling about Balfour got in the way of my enjoyment of Bourgeois. I really didn’t see how any sort of appreciation of her work was helped by accompanying it with thirty enormous and rather rudimentary diagrams through which young Victorian men might learn about the parts of plants. Where were the “strikingly similar themes” between the two bodies of work, mentioned in the exhibition blurb?

I’m still troubled by what was going on in the space between upstairs and downstairs at this exhibition. And somehow the whole experience has made me like Bourgeois less. But am I missing something? Am I misrepresenting Balfour? According to Catriona Black in The Herald, the pairing of Balfour and Bourgeois was the result of a “casual conversation” between the exhibition’s New York and Edinburgh curators. If anyone thinks that there is more to it than that, can you let me know?

jaunt

We went on a jaunt to the National Museum of Costume outside Dumfries, to see the “Hip Knits” exhibition. In the Museum’s permanent collections, there were some fabulous nineteenth-century dresses and shoes on display, but my favourite thing of the day was this:

incredibly fine linen whitework, backed with pink silk, and made by one Jenny Grant in 1724.

I have to say that the so-called knitting exhibition was something of a disappointment. As it was being held in a branch of the National Museum of Scotland, and given the rich variety of knitting traditions Scotland has to boast, I was hoping to see at least something about the history and techniques of Scottish knitting. But no. There was not a Sanquar glove, a Shetland shawl, or a Fair isle Sweater to be seen. The emphasis of the exhibition was firmly on the contemporary commercial appeal of machine knitted and woven woollen products. This would have been fair enough if there had been some sort of curatorial direction as to how to interpret the objects on display. But the viewer wasn’t given any sort of context to aid understanding of the small range of garments arranged about the room. A catalogue, or display cards, might have told us, for example, about the history of machine knitting and weaving; the emergence of distinctively Scottish modes of textile production; the evolution of industrial techniques; the importance of different regional knitting traditions, and so on. But there was very little of this nature for the viewer to get a handle on. There was no exhibition catalogue, and the information on the display cards told us only, in the briefest of terms, about the designers and producers of particular garments.

Donna Wilson’s Cuddly Clouds

While there was an overkill of the sort of brightly coloured, machine knit cashmere that tourists to Scotland seem to find endlessly appealing, objects and artefacts made in distinctive locales by innovative new Scottish designers were relegated to the edges of the exhibit. The most interesting things there (for me at least) were Donna Wilson’s witty machine knitted objects (Wilson also collaborates with the successful Orkney company Tait & Style) and Andrea Williamson’s beautiful muffler, influenced by both Shetland and Scandanavian design traditions. I liked looking at these things, but I wasn’t sure, in the end, what sort of relationship I was meant to conceive between these objects and the Vivien Westwood suit made up of jigsaws of woven tweed, or the pair of turquoise cashmere knickers. And while one could buy, in the musuem gift shop, Sarah Dallas’s Scottish Inspirations , in the exhibition proper one saw very little Scottish hand knitting at all. In the end, all these “hip-knits” said to the viewer was: here are a few woolly things that happen to be made in Scotland. And given how vital and intriguing the contemporary world of Scottish textiles is at the moment, that’s not really saying enough. . .

On a different sort of wool-front, the spring fields were alive with sheep and lambs all the way from Edinburgh to Dumfries. I ate this non-woolly one.

words and stitches

Last night I dreamt I was reading a sweater. I stood at the front of a full room. The sweater was my script and I read aloud from its stitches as if they were braille. Perhaps this dream suggests my mind’s happy ability to mingle together what I do for a living with what I do in my ’spare’ time. On the other hand, it may be a more disturbing indication of how thoroughly the world of yarn and textiles has invaded my subconscious.

Either way, I have had both words and stitches on the brain since my day at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate. In the quilt competition, my sister and I were both struck by Sara Impey’s contribution:

Sara Impey, detail of Quilt Blog (2007)

Her Quilt Blog is a truly beautiful thing – the sheer quality of stuff and technique really sings out of the stitches. But it is also a serious meditation on the conflict between the momentary and the slow process, particularly as that regards ideas of making. One’s first instinct when looking at the quilt is to understand it speedily, almost instantaneously—to read it as a straightforward message to the viewer from the maker. Following the words from left to right, you quickly trace a narrative questioning the process of making (‘. . . find yourself asking why anybody bothers making things in this age of instant gratification. . . ’). But, in the act of unpicking that narrative you start to notice how the characters emerge out of the negative spaces on the fabric canvas. It is almost as if the quilt is writing itself. Impey stitches only in the spaces between her thoughts. She makes us look at the process of making under and behind the words we read. In so doing, we contemplate the gap between vision and labour—the gap that is the time of the quilt’s making, its slow process. So we are prompted to think in a rather different way about her art, her fabrication. Rather than seeing the quilt as a lovely thing conveying a message to us in a moment, we consider it more fully as an object made over time . . . the time of its stitches . . . a long time! The quilt is both doing, and meditating upon, what it is saying—acting itself out, and thinking about itself with some considerable aplomb.

Sara Impey, detail of Quilt Blog (2007)

The narrative time of stitching was also an issue in the Primmy and Jessie Chorley exhibition. I found Jessie Chorley’s fabric-books and book-fabrications particularly intriguing. Like Louise Bourgeois, Jessie Chorley reflects powerfully on books, stitches and lives as made-up things; as narrative processes; and as numinous objects full of meaning. But though her books are certainly suggestive in their stitching-up of time and memory, I confess I found the Chorleys’ oppressively cutesy household aesthetic something of an impediment to what was most interesting about their art. In that small exhibition space surrounded by the work of the Chorleys’ I felt as if I were trapped in a 1980s fantasy of Edwardian femininity—a sort of hollow Holly Hobbie world with little basis in, or recourse to, the lived traditions of women’s domestic creativity. However carefully considered their familial self-presentation is in its appeal to memory, fantasy, and the uncanny, the Chorleys’ aesthetic had (for me at least) the unfortunate — and certainly misleading — effect of suggesting that their art had little to say to the world beyond itself.

My reaction to the work of Tilleke Schwarz was completely different. Both my sister and I were completely blown away by it and could have spent the whole day with her embroidered canvases alone. In one way or another, Schwarz’s art is often compared to graffiti. She clearly possesses a certain urban chutzpah, but because hers is so definitively an art of stitch and the slow process, I find the graffiti association a little misleading. A more moot association might be with white noise or radio interference — as the momentary or incidental constantly intrudes upon the slow-time of stitching, living, and remembering. All of her canvases somehow suggested aural interference to me. And her mixing of different stitch techniques and genres, as well as the intrusion of other bits of the material world into the stuff of the canvas itself, conveys how the ephemera of everyday life disrupts and yet defines narrative comprehension of ourselves and our histories.

Tilleke Schwarz Beware of Embroidery (1997)

Schwarz has an ability — unparalleled to my mind in contemporary textile art — of mingling wit and poignancy in stitch. In Beware of Embroidery a banner bearing familiar SWEET ‘N LOW lettering flies blithely and bullet-like toward the anguished visage of twentieth-century Jewish cultural memory. In the same canvas, an enormous and slightly scary bottle of brown sauce divides and illuminates a figure whose ghostly whites and reds seem to suggest material pain and spiritual salvation simultaneously. Embroidered cats sport anarchically over every path of meaning. Neat and ostensibly prim cross-stitched figures kick each other up the arse. Overheard snippets of conversation, advertising copy, scraps of text, and the walk-don’t-walk imperatives which allow us to successfully negotiate the confusing labyrinth of ordinary living all gather together, reminding us that there is never the one story to tell ourselves about ourselves. Schwarz’s stitches say that the stories are always going to be interrupted, the narrative constantly disturbed, by the fabric of life itself.

Tilleke Schwarz, Count Your Blessings

In Count your Blessings Schwarz stitches the familiar image of a coffee-cup lid telling its drinker to ‘sip with care.’ In someone else’s work, there might be something obvious about rendering a disposable thing in an art form that is so emphatically not about disposability. But there is nothing obvious here. Schwarz’s coffee cup speaks beyond that simple contrast between the slow-stitch-medium and the ephemeral commodity. It says something about how the disposable might actually take care of the human; about how, even as we wander distracted in a world of terrible, alienating things and events, the cup we drink from will remind us not to burn ourselves. In stitch, the cup is re-appropriated as a messenger of caution and resolve. Yet even as embroidered art lends this thing an agency almost human, elsewhere in her canvas Schwarz reminds us of how chillingly de-humanising the process of appropriation or representation can be: “members of aboriginal communities are respectfully advised,” stitches Schwarz “that a number of people depicted in photographs in this room have now passed away.” It is this dialogic and inconclusive quality of each canvas that is so refreshing and ultimately modest about Schwarz’s art. It is as if just by listening to the symphony of everyday life Schwarz has turned herself into an instrument and played it all back to us—in words and in stitches, with quiet accomplishment, with breathtaking virtuosity. And it is up to us what we make of it in the end.

Images reproduced by permission of the artists.

cloth and paper

I promised an account of the Whitworth, where we spent a lovely afternoon last week. I had really gone for the textile galleries, but we were distracted by a fabulous wallpaper exhibition. This showcased a wide range of examples from the Whitworth’s decorative arts collection, and you really got a sense of the range of ways in which wallpaper might define and transform an interior over four centuries. The displays paid careful attention to the history of technique, innovations in production, and the exhibition was very thoughtfully and intuitively set out.

Wallpaper often had surprising or unexpected functions and designs—for me this aspect of the exhibition was highlighted in the elaborate decorative schemes of the 1930s, in which ordinary middle-class parlours were transformed by being bedecked with paper vines and flowers hanging from ceilings and picture rails. But my favourite examples were the miraculously preserved wallpapers from the 1770s to the early 1800s:

I really think that the Jane Austen industry has left us with a version of the eighteenth century that is misleading in its pale muslin and Wedgwood-muted pastels. This anodyne, relentlessly tasteful, and terribly washed-out aesthetic is frankly more Nigella Lawson (aigh!) than Austen. This was an era of gaudy exuberance, when classical statues were enhanced with bright coats of paint, and interior decoration embraced colourful excesses. The busy patterns of this French paper seem completely alien to many popular conceptions of Georgian style:

but this is what the bourgeois Eighteenth Century looked like.

We also spent some time in the textile galleries, which were excellent. The Whitworth has one of the best collections of textiles in the UK, only a small fraction of which can be on show at any one time. What *was* displayed was arranged really judiciously. Rather than presenting a historical narrative, or separating the textiles by culture or locale, the curator had chosen several examples from different eras, places and moments to illustrate a particular function, theme, or idea. This approach worked well, allowing the viewer to get a sense of, for example the imperial aesthetics of British textiles by displaying Victorian shawls alongside the much earlier Indian designs on which they were based. The case displaying the original Japanese influences of familiar modern textiles (such as Morris & Co’s now ubiquitous willow bough) was particularly good.

I was blown away by the beauty of the embroidered textiles–those of the Middle East particularly. There were some wonderfully elaborate Iranian and Turkish examples from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. But, loving crewel work as I do, I have to say that the best thing I saw all day was this:

A crewel sampler worked by Doris “AR” (acquisition details of this marvellous panel can be found here). I think this is the most superb take on the traditional Anglo-American tree of life that I’ve ever seen. I just love the spirit and audacity of it – her bold modern take on traditional embroidery techniques; the way that every flower head and leaf explores a different stitch; the vibrant blues and greens of the wool against the linen, and the overall sense that this is the work of an accomplished needlewoman showing off her talent. The whole thing is a sort of crewel fanfare, a big “ta-da!” It says “look at me”, “look what I can do.” And yet, because of the nature of the art (a decorative panel for private or social display) and its small scale (appreciated by women who might observe or handle it close to) Doris AR is speaking the language of an aesthetic community rather than her individual ego. It is really quite exceptional. I may take inspiration from this for the panel I am planning to produce for Christmas but feel at the moment, rather too in awe of the original to attempt a design.