Reflections on Bummock: The Lace Archive Symposium

Abstract

“Reflections on Bummock” explored and expanded upon issues arising from the residency and exhibition, Bummock: The Lace Archive, held at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham, in 2018. The symposium reflected on the work of three artists, Andrew Bracey, Danica Maier, and Lucy Renton, and how they spent two-and-a-half years researching the Lace Archive held at Nottingham Trent University to catalyze the creation of new artworks. “Bummock,” which refers to the large part of an iceberg hidden beneath the surface of the sea, was adopted by the artists as a heuristic device to explore unseen or undervalued parts of archives to generate new readings, knowledge, and responses. Discussions included the artists’ development of a “controlled rummaging” methodology to select items, and how the exhibited outcomes illustrated “the flipping of the bummock” to reveal the underside of the archive. The resulting artworks were idiosyncratic, referencing historical lace objects through traces of supplementary documentation, as opposed to replicating the more seductive, esthetic characteristics of the textile. Invited speakers Amanda Briggs-Goode, Deborah Dean, Sian Vaughan, and Pennina Barnett contributed alternative insights to working with the materials (and politics) of archives, based on their experiences as, respectively, a custodian, curator, historian, and writer.

Keywords:

• lace
• textile
• lace archive
• heuristic research
• artistic response

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine Townsend

Katherine Townsend is an associate professor in fashion and textile crafts in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University. She has a background in the fashion and textile industry, where she co-directed two independent labels (based in Nottingham and London) and worked as a freelance designer. Her current research projects, “Emotional Fit: Developing an Inclusive Fashion Methodology with Mature Women” and “The Electric Corset and Other Future Histories,” explore sustainable, material, and cultural issues in fashion and textiles, and the use of costume archives to inform the design of e-textiles and wearables. Her research into the role of embodied knowledge in the digital crafting of embroidered textiles was published in the chapter “Closely Held Secrets,” in Crafting Textiles in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2016). She is coeditor of the journal of Craft Research and of Crafting Anatomies: Archives, Dialogues, Fabrications (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). [email protected]