Textile and Place

Abstract

This special issue explores how textiles can define our identities in ways that are bound up with how they are made and also with how cloth is used in specific places. Place is defined by its physical aspect and its constituency of people, and also by its transactions with other places, in which the exchange, circulation and consumption of textiles play a key role. The first section explores how textiles are involved in codifying place through tradition and memory and through site-specific and community-based practices, while the second section focuses on the role of textiles in movement between places, transmission of histories, the crossing of cultural boundaries, migration, and postcolonialism. Contributors examine how textiles register and record change, and provide a means to place the past in dialog with the present. Textiles can also play a role in making change happen, in strengthening community solidarity and in constructing new ideas of place. Close attention is paid to processes of making and also to the metaphorical resonances of textiles that provide critical and creative ways of thinking through conflicted relations with places and their histories. The influence of textiles extends from the specific and local to global networks of relationships.

Keywords:

• textile
• place
• cloth
• making
• global
• community
• tradition
• migration

Notes

Notes

1 This includes the concept of non-places such as airplanes or shops whose individual identity has been lost (Augé 1995).

2 Paper presented at the “Textile and Place” conference, Manchester School of Art, 2016.

3 Lubaina Himid MBE was the keynote speaker at the “Textile and Place” conference in 2016 at the Manchester School of Art. A British contemporary artist and curator, she is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom. She was the Turner Prize winner in 2017.

4 The exhibition was part of “Cotton Global Threads,” curated at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. See http://cottonglobalthreads.com

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alice Kettle

Alice Kettle is a contemporary textile/fiber artist based in the UK. Her stitched works are held in various international public collections including the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester and the Hanshan Art Museum, China. She is Professor of Textile Arts at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. [email protected]