Revive, revive!
In Revive, revive!, images of textiles published through the peak of the 1970s’ craft revival have been meticulously interwoven. Sourced from a collection of instructional weaving books destined for disposal, the work ‘revives’ these images as a way of critiquing how textile histories, knowledge and traditions have been recorded, documented and passed on.
A residue of these publications, Revive, revive! exposes the remaining pattern once their intended value has been eroded by stripping away the written word. This contentious act draws a parallel between our willingness to render this documentation redundant, and to erase it through disposal, and the very publication of fragmentary and reductive textile histories that exclusively promote their technical aspect.
Constructed from the publications’ centrefold plates, two coloured bands – an extrapolated warp and weft – border the work. In a poetic interpretation akin to the reading of family tartans, the meeting of these axes proposes a two-pronged revival.
The first of these is a revival of art and craft making as a unified phenomenon where ideas and skills are evenly tensioned. It promotes a method of making that is beyond categorisation and actively works against a more recent obsession with dematerialising the art object.
If ‘revival’ implies an improvement in the condition or strength of something, the second prong suggests a renaissance of textile making and textile thinking – a resurgence of material literacy, where textiles are inherently understood beyond their technical properties and are accepted as carriers of complex cultural perspectives, historically mutable and yet can remain unchanged through tradition.
Exhibited as part of The 5th Tamworth Textiles Triennial, Residue & Response. Curated by Dr. Carol McGregor