Since it’s St Patrick’s Day, I thought it might be nice to post something Irish-related that wasn’t strewn shamrocks or leprechauns and doesn’t involve green beer. It is an exhibition currently running at the Linen Museum in Lisburn, N. Ireland. If you get a chance, it’s a great museum for fiber lovers! I got to try spinning there!

The exhibition shows work from a arts-in-education project I worked on called “CREATE/Trading Places“. Artists did three-year residencies in 10 schools in Ireland and Northern Ireland, working with students exploring the history of the linen industry in their local area. They explored industrialisation- and the change from small home-based crafting industry to factories, and the dangerous working conditions of fabric production. Some groups explored the linen material itself; some the manufacturing; some the fabric; some the working conditions; some the rituals around using the products.

We work with fabric everyday, and maybe we can forget the history behind it, and what it takes to make it. The work that came out of the project is interesting because it delves into the fabric.

These children worked with Ann Henderson, and over the course of this project developed some really interesting investigations. This piece is done on the Jacquard loom, which uses punchcards that looks like computer programming cards. And each line represents a secret self-portrait written in binary code by the children. It’s beautiful to boot.

They explored many aspects of weaving, see this project done with artist Anna Reitberger. The image here is from later on in the collaboration. “Copy Weaves”.

These kids worked with dancer Nicola Curry and created a structure and did several performances literally ‘weaving’ their bodies through the structure.

This is work by Irish artist, Angela Ginn. The painting is drawn from a projection of Irish lace into fabric. And then the shapes are cut out. You can see more like this from a mid-project exhibition at the Millenium Court in Portadown.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 1:27 am and is filed under exhibitions+design+extreme. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.