Banal and splendid form: revaluing textile makers’ social and poetic identity as a strategy for textile manufacturing innovation

Abstract

This is a submission for the Award of PhD by Published Works. The commentary on three published submissions organises a programme of work focussed on reframing traditional textile craft skills within the context of innovation and knowledge exchange policies. This overarching problem is presented through expanding spheres of activity, from personal textile art practice, to collaborative projects, to social and public policy thinking. The research outputs include a textile based video work, case studies completed for a three year EU funded project, and selected chapters from an academic book.

The consistent aim of the research has been to engage audiences with valorising and recovering textile skills, the shared cultural significance of making cloth and the renewal of industry informed by heritage and social values. My research journey addressed these through critical challenges to prevailing practices of the period, new representational formats and theoretical investigations on the social purpose of making textiles. The following questions have guided my project: is technology a way to challenge narrative development and revaluing of textiles? Is textile production a narrative of collecting and expanded authorship? Can this view enable innovation and competitive advantage in artisanal manufacture?

The research methods engaged textile based work with fine art practices, psychoanalytic and cultural theory frameworks. Methods from one discipline were used to inform another, developing visual solutions informed by textile related vocabularies and methodologies.
For example, quilting is used to discuss the layering of identities, separation and fragmentary experiences, temporality and recurrence, as well as an economy of cultural and emotional exchange. In later outputs this interdisciplinary knowledge enriches the qualitative case study findings on creative industry models and entrepreneurial innovation.

The research findings indicate that textile making can be understood as a social and progressive process of identity creation, inflected by the clustering of diverse narratives. Leveraging the difference in social and cultural capital in textile production clusters can be a model of renewal, bringing about innovation as a consequence of familiar, manual contexts. Further research could be undertaken to identify how new textile enterprises might gain from and sustain heterogeneous communities, for example brought about through migration, to the benefit of social inclusion and industry renewal.

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