Modern Swatches

I've been trying for the past few weeks to figure out how I should start this post, but I've been having trouble, so I'm just going to come out with it:

I'm making a swatch book about the work of contemporary weavers.

This came about primarily though a discovery I made at my university library a few years ago - I found a copy of the Red book by Malin Selander, a Swedish weaver, who, after lecturing and teaching in America in the 1960s, returned home and spent nearly two decades producing four runs of books containing real handwoven swatches. It made so much sense - of course you would have a sample in the book, how else would a fellow craftsperson truly understand your work from flat, 2 dimensional words and photographs? Weaving cloth - and then experiencing the finished textile - is such a material, tactile experience, and the meat of your knowledge comes through direct contact, through your hands. 

So for the last few months I've been reaching out to some of the many weavers whose work I follow online and asking them if they'd like to participate by weaving a number of swatches. As these swatches come in over the next few months, I'll begin photographing and collating them into a book  - a limited number of books containing real swatches will be made for the participants, and then a small run of books will be produced that will contain photographs. 

Textiles tell so much about us – we make them to cover ourselves, keep warm, shroud our dead, soak up our tears, and tell others about who we are and where we are from. With this in mind, I’m curious about the why of modern textiles – what is it that draws us all to cloth making? This project, which I am calling Modern Swatches, will try to provide a glimpse into the way contemporary weavers practice and utilize cloth, and try to articulate this why in a form that needs no clicking or flicking - in something that you can hold in your hand.

In my next post I'll tell you more about the weavers who have been incredibly generous in agreeing to make swatches for this project. The support I've received from them alone is enough to tell me that there is interest in this sort of project, and so I am thrilled to be able to gather their cloth together and share with others their textile practices.

Thanks for reading - please let me know your thoughts if you have any!

Craft

 

There's an interesting article on the Selvedge Magazine blog by Polly Leonard about the word craft (and I do love the many meanings, allusions, and inferences words can bring)

"The problem is the word Craft. It is just too general – encompassing everything from Alison Morton’s exquisite hand woven linen tea towels to something produced as a response to Kirstie Allsopp’s have-a-go manifesto, and everything in between.

...

In the West, particularly the UK, this idea is turned on its head – we teach students as young as fourteen to think creatively and develop an idea through to a conclusion, with the intention that they will pick up the necessary skills during their personal creative journey ... However, on a rudimentary level creativity is the easy bit. Almost anyone can make something..."

Give it a read here.