Pragmatics of Attachment and Detachment: a Constellatory Re-inscription of Textile
The invitation to contribute a chapter to A Companion to Textile Culture by its editor Dr Jennifer Harris followed on from my previous exhibition project ‘Concordance’ at the Whitworth Gallery Manchester (29.7.13 - 1.9.13) where Dr Harris was the Deputy Director and Curator of Textiles. The volume is distinctive in containing new writing and exploring a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches - technological, anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytical amongst others. It brings together ‘the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognised experts in the field’ providing diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives from academics, artists and curators, ranging across conventional boundaries of chronology, geography and discipline - an approach that is still unusual in this field of study. Of the 24 contributors, only three are from the UK and I am the only artist writing about my own work. Whilst my own 9000-word chapter contributes to the specific field of textiles, it also contributes to broader artistic/philosophical debates surrounding the tension between medium specific and post media approaches.
- Submitting institution
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University of Chester
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-15/621783
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- A Companion to Textile Culture
- Publisher
- Wiley Blackwell
- ISBN
- 9781118768907
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- 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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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- My chapter sits within a section entitled ‘Contemporary Textiles: Conceptual Boundaries’ which explores how the medium renders the boundaries of academic discipline elastic and some of the reasons why textiles have traditionally been marginalised in histories of 20th century visual culture. My contribution provides an artist’s perspective that draws on a body of work that emerged out of a period of practice-based doctoral research entitled Pragmatics of Attachment and Detachment: Medium (Un)Specificity as Material Agency in Contemporary Art. The research takes as its point of departure my own boundary position and the creative, critical and professional challenge of how to acknowledge situated experience and communicate the particular richness and complexity of textile’s material and semantic conventions, whilst embracing the heterogeneity and creative freedom afforded by the post-medium condition of contemporary art. In the chapter, I outline a conceptual framework and series of practice strategies that revolve around this dynamic tension between assimilation and differentiation, together with a wider philosophical and phenomenological interrogation of the consequences of this process of centring and decentring. Through a new body of sculptural and installational practice, I propose a constellatory opening up of textile where ‘medium specificity’ is re-inscribed in terms of ‘material agency’. Within this expanded (inter)relational re-mapping of textile’s complex somatic and semantic codes and conventions, textile is seen to be a medium of convergence and divergence that has the capacity to mobilise multiple, complex and often contradictory sensuous and semantic resonances. Here hierarchical disciplinary distinctions become untenable, meaning is suggested but unable to settle and categorical divisions between subject and object are destabilised. I argue that it is this state of what I describe as ‘productive indeterminacy’ that paradoxically accounts for both the cultural ambivalence and cultural significance of textile - and arguably its potency and artistic pliability as a medium.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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