The Textile Reader: : Jessica Hemmings: Berg Publishers

The Textile Reader

Description

The Textile Reader is the first anthology to address textiles as a distinctive area of cultural practice and a developing field of scholarly research. Revealing the full diversity of approaches to the study of textiles, The Textile Reader introduces students to the theoretical frameworks essential to the exploration of the textile from both a critical and a creative perspective.

Content is drawn from a wide range of genres - blogs, artists' statements and fiction, as well as critical writings - and organized in themed sections covering touch, memory, structure, politics, production and use. The content of each thematic section is separately introduced and concludes with a bibliography for further reading. The Textile Reader is an invaluable resource for students of textile design, textile art, applied arts and crafts and material culture.

Selected authors include Anni Albers; Gilles Deleuze; Félix Guattari; Sarat Maharaj; Rozsika Parker; Sadie Plant; Peter Stallybrass; Alice Walker; and Catherine de Zegher.

Introduction

Touch
1. Mitchell, Victoria (Norwich University College of the Arts, UK). "Textiles, Text and Techne" in Obscure Objects of Desire: Reviewing the Crafts in the Twentieth Century, Tanya Harrod (ed.)
2. Hamlyn, Anne (owner of Dress Me, a wardrobe consultancy business, London, UK). "Freud, Fabric, Fetish" in Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture
3. Harper, Catherine (University of Brighton, UK). "Meditation on Translation and Seduction" in 2121: the Textile Vision of Reiko Sudo and Nuno.
4. Dinesen, Isak (pen name of Danish author Karen Blixen). "The Blank Page"
5. Hill, June (formerly Museums Manager for Bankfield Museum, West Yorkshire, UK). "Sense and Sensibility"
6. Bristow, Maxine (University of Chester, UK). "Continuity of Touch: Textiles as Silent Witness"

Memory
7. Sorkin, Jenni (University of Houston, USA). "Stain: On Cloth, Stigma, and Shame", Third Text Journal
8. Wildgoose, Jane (Wildgoose Memorial Library, London, UK). "Considering the Evidence"
9. Stallybrass, Peter (University of Pennsylvania, USA). "Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things," The Yale Review 81, no. 2
10. Prichard, Sue (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK). "Collecting the Contemporary: Love Will Decide What is Kept and Science Will Decide How it is Kept". Textile: Journal of Cloth & Culture
11. Healy, Robyn (RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia). "The Parody of the Motley Cadaver"
12. Fenimore Cooper, James. Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief

Structure
13. Calvino, Italo. "Thin Cities" & "Trading Cities". Invisible Cities
14. Beesley, Philip (University of Waterloo, Canada). "Reflexive Textile"
15. Zegher, Catherine M. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA). "Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots". The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña
16. Showalter, Elaine (Professor Emerita, Princeton University, USA). "Piecing and Writing". The Poetics of Gender. ed. Nancy K. Miller
17. Whittaker, Paul (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK) & Padovani, Clio (Birmingham City University, UK). "Testing Orthodoxy: Collecting, the Gaze and Knitting the Impossible"
18. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. "Smooth & Striated Space" A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism & Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
19. Barnett, Pennina (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK). "Folds, Fragments, Surfaces: Towards a Poetics of Cloth"
20. Clark, Judith (London College of Fashion, UK). "Statement VI"

Politics
21. Danto, Arthur C. (Columbia University, New York, USA). "Weaving as Metaphor and Model for Political Thought" in Sheila Hicks
22. Auther, Elissa (University of Colorado, USA). "Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960-80" Journal of Modern Craft
23. Conroy, Diana Wood (University of Wollongong, Australia). "Textiles From the Edge: Tapestry Identity in Australia"
24. Bean, Susan S. (Peabody Essex Museum, USA) "Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Indian Independence" in Cloth and Human Experience, edited by Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider
25. Maharaj, Sarat (Lund University and Malmo Art Academies, Sweden). "Arachne's Genre: Towards Intercultural Studies in Textiles" Journal of Design History
26. Shonibare, Yinka (Artist, London, UK). "Setting the Stage: Yinka Shonibare MBE in Conversation with Anthony Downey" in Yinka Shonibare MBE
27. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Columbia University, New York, USA). "Culture" in a Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present
28. Johnson, Pamela (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK). "100% Cotton"
29. Bryan-Wilson, Julia (University of California, Irvine, USA). "Lisa Anne Auerbach's Canny Domesticity"
30. Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine: introduction to new edition
31. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Production
32. Barber, Elizabeth Wayland (Occidental College, Los Angeles, USA). "A Tradition with Reason" Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years, Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times
33. Plant, Sadie (Independent writer, UK). Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture.
34. Carpenter, Ele (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK). "Open Source Embroidery: Curatorial Facilitations of Material Networks"
35. Robertson, Kirsty (University of Western Ontario, Canada). "Embroidery Pirates and Fashion Victims: Textiles, Craft and Copyright, Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture
36. Miller, Melanie (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK). "Mechanical Drawing: the Schiffli Project"
37. Von Mertens, Anna (Artist, USA). Artist's Statement
38. Earley, Becky (Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK). Conference Transcript
39. Albers, Anni. "Constructing Textiles" in Anni Albers: Selected Writings on Design
40. Lee, Suzanne (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, UK). Blog

Use
41. McQuaid, Matilda (Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, USA). "Stronger, Faster, Lighter, Safer and Smarter" from Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance
42. Gschwadtner, Sabrina (Artist and Writer, New York, USA). "Knitting Is..." The Journal of Modern Craft
43. Taylor, Lou (University of Brighton, UK). "De-coding the Hierarchy of Fashion Textiles" in Disentangling Textiles
44. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter
45. Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use" In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts, eds. Elaine Hedges & Ingrid Wendt

Index

Product details

Published	Oct 17 2019
Format	Paperback
Edition	1st
Extent	488
ISBN	9781350132276
Imprint	Berg Publishers
Illustrations	40 bw illus
Dimensions	10 x 7 inches
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

This Reader is not merely a collection, but more of an interrogation that speaks from the past to the future . . . With this in mind, The Textile Reader is not a 'page turner', but a constant companion, a new friend that has been there and done that, and thus offers the reader a platform from which to consider and develop the future of the discipline.

Jo Turney, Bath Spa University, Textile History
[T]he pieces are well chosen: they read as though they were selected because someone likes them and finds them interesting, and this gives the selection personality and integrity ... Its greatest value is, however, in its general sense of opening out the genres and the way in which it creates a space for different types of writing on textiles to be considered on an equal footing.

Eleanor Flegg, University of Ulster, UK, The Journal of Modern Craft 7:3
This is a book that will undoubtedly become a key resource for all those interested in considering the location of textile practice, but also for those who seek to understand and challenge textile practice's perceived inferiority as a mode of practice.

Embroidery Magazine, November 2012
This is an ideal foundational text to give an overview of the broad field of Textile Research. It allows students access to a range of themes and key authors in the field which can then be researched in more depth.

Dr Fiona Curran, Royal College of Art, UK