Machine-made lace, the spaces of skilled practices and the paradoxes of contemporary craft production
- Submitting institution
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Nottingham Trent University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 36 - 703059
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1177/1474474016680106
- Title of journal
- cultural geographies
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 49
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- -
- ISSN
- 1474-4740
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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B - Design Research Centre
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This article is based on multidisciplinary research awarded £90k by the AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage programme to understand the knowledge in the industrial craft practices of machine lace-making, working closely with the management and workers at Cluny Lace, Ilkeston, the only company remaining in the UK that uses the Leavers process developed in Nottingham to make patterned lace. Fisher’s original approach to studying craft process and through a multidisciplinary project team builds on his insights into craft and design practice and his previous work that has combined Humanities and Social Science approaches. The team included urban history, material ethnography and design, each disciplinary approach triangulated on the others to ensure rigour of process. Alongside oral history interviews and a 3D animation of the Leavers machine, the team generated the ethnography that is the basis for this article, which describes significant findings of two kinds. First, it draws on recent work in archaeology on distributed cognition, which can be applied in the study of craft process in the field of Art and Design and adds to that literature by providing a clearly explicated case study for this theoretical approach to craft. Second, publication in Cultural Geographies means the article capitalises on the multidisciplinary approach by locating it in relation to studies of craft processes that engage with the global context.
The oral history work has been published as Hayes, N (2017) ‘Heritage, craft, and identity: twisthands and their machinery in what’s left of the British lace industry’, Labour History Review. The 3D animation work, and a descriptive overview of the project, has been published as Fisher, T., Donovan, N., and Botticello, J., (2016) ‘Using 3D Animation to Capture and Preserve Intangible Heritage: Industrial Textile Crafts’, Furnace Journal of Ironbridge Industrial Institute for Cultural Heritage, 3.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -