I have been carrying around Lesley Millar’s Textile Routes, it is such a rich text :
‘I have been told that for most people in the Middle East a piece of material is everything. It is what you carry with you everywhere, like a nomad. It is your personal tent in some ways. It protects you from everything. You can wrap up, you can sleep on the sand. It has many, many purposes, a large material that also doesn’t take much space. You can carry it in one hand’.
It is this sense of something more practical and yet still magical which I would like to be a quality of the new project, in the experience of those who participate.
Also, this leads to thinking about Middle-Eastern refugee and asylum experiences , as they will be my specific point of audience engagement for this next stage of the Loom project. It occurs to me that in fact it’s not human stories that I have been directly interested in representing per se, they are so personal and fragile.. although it IS these stories that will inspire any shared experience within an engaged environment. It is, in fact, the uncovering and acknowledging of the primary emotion behind a life-changing experience (whether past or present) which performs the transformative work of the piece and is at the heart of what I have been doing these last three years. There is something in the alchemical nature of live interaction within both projects that I have witnessed happening, that can/has transformed some people’s relationship to an experience of pain – and that has been at the core of the work. It is the space between the threads of the cloth. I am working out the nature of the threads themselves in this process.
The visceral quality of a textile-based work to communicate something unspoken, trans-culturally, its fluid nature as a messenger of meaning is why I am so attracted to it, though still so much a lay person in the practice of any skill related to it. Today I was reminded by my (English) grandmother that she trained and worked from a young age at a Milliners, doing alterations etc and she used to take me along when I was a baby to work with her, while my (Iranian) mother was off briefing her ‘Crochet Ladies’ on her patterns for dresses for Harrods in the 60’s.I had forgotten this connection to cloth was on both sides of the family, it is comforting, and makes sense given my attraction to the medium.
“Cloth and Human experience’ arrived today, also Kruger’s ‘Weaving the Word’. I am planning to carve out some child-free time to read these as they will I think provide some more sparks of light…
