Inspired by the rich industrial heritage of my hometown, my textile practise explores weaving, stitching, experimental techniques, and natural dyeing. These processes and their historical context inform all aspects of my designs.
Hidden in the landscape and layered history of the rural village, Cawthorne, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, this project explores its industrial past through a textile archive. From the seventeenth to late nineteenth century, Cawthorneâs industrial heritage included leather tanning at Dean Hill Tannery, ironworking at Cinderhill and coal mining at Barnby Furnace. These industries partook in the economic and social identity of the village in past time, which has since been overshadowed by its agricultural industry.
This project embodies history in a form of material memory to demonstrate how cloth can hold time and lived experience in ways that resist purely linguistic or documentary forms of record. This project expands into the terrain of industrial history, with contemporary aspects forming in the material approach; using bark, iron and coal as active agents, where the substances are re-examined and remembered within a textile context.
Coal mining is explored through works of felted weave to reference geological compression and structural weave to embody mining labour and its physical receptive motions.
Ironworks are explored through rust printing, where oxidisation marks cloth, linking to theories of indexicality where an object leaves a trace from direct contact.
Leather tanning oak bark becomes a conceptual reference through both dyestuff and a textural from.
