Making Textiles: History>Identity>Innovation
- Submitting institution
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The University of Bolton
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 0049_32_REF2_DC_01
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Bolton Museum and Art Gallery
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- January
- Year of first exhibition
- 2019
- 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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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Making Textiles was a curated exhibition, supported by a brochure, which centred on Bolton Museum’s later industrial and textile archives.
Contextual information: For decades, Bolton’s identity was closely bound up with its position as one of the country’s leading textile producing towns. Claypool’s archival research explored this rich heritage of textiles within Bolton, uncovering a range of 5,000 painted design artworks for domestic furnishing fabrics which offered a rare insight into working practices of design. Since the archive store is not accessible to the public, Claypool saw a unique opportunity to narrate the story of Bolton as told through the wider archive collection.
Claypool devised a two-year collaborative practice-based project involving academic staff and students which asked how the museum’s historic textiles collection could be used as the stimulus for creation of new work. Through research into the pattern books, paper designs and related artefacts in the archive, the collaborators produced a detailed creative response to the history of textiles in Bolton during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The research found that the museum’s collections were a surprising resource for understanding the experience of textile design, manufacturing and living in Bolton. Additionally, by grounding their practice in the history of their discipline, staff and students were able to push the design and production of textiles in new directions.
The project culminated in Claypool’s curated exhibition Making Textiles: History>Identity>Innovation in Bolton Museum 24 January to 23 February 2019. An early positioning paper was presented at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association 2017 conference and the work was discussed in 'An Archive Collection for Collaborative Partnership and Pedagogic Textile Practice’. Further dissemination took place at the Textile and Place conference at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Fashion and Textiles Association Futurescan 4: Valuing Practice 2019 conference at the University of Bolton.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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