GRADUATES
Linda Brassington PhD 2021
Title: Resist Dyeing: metaphorical and performance meanings in modern and contemporary cloth.
The investigation aims to develop a critical perspective of resist dyeing within the vacant spaces between historical surveys and technical handbooks. The research will explore the transition from traditional practice to modern and contemporary cloth. It will question how processes of resist dyeing, their associated substances and dyestuffs reveal metaphorical meaning, and how contrasting sites of practice convey materiality, gesture and concept. The research will consider how individual and cultural identity is reflected in resist dyeing, through an understanding of performance in making.
Lynn Setterington PhD 2019
Title: Hidden Value, Points of Tension. An Investigation into Embroidery Practices in the Context of Socially Engaged Art
The purpose of this research is to re-assess embroidery in relation to socially engaged art practice and investigate the role of a maker within this field. The study will offer new insight into socially engaged art and shed light on the experiences of craft practitioners, as Harper (2012) acknowledges this has been overlooked in academic epistemologies. It will explore if embroidery lacks visibility because the stereotyping of hand sewing as benign, non-threatening and decorative still remains. Similarly, what part do the associations with low status community arts play in this, despite Kester’s acknowledgement that artists including Hirschhorn employ methodologies redolent of these community arts?
Beverly Ayling-Smith PhD 2017
Title: The Space Between Mourning and Melancholia: the use of cloth in contemporary art practice to materialise the work of mourning
In his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Sigmund Freud described the process of mourning as coming to a spontaneous end like a wound which has healed. In contrast, melancholia is like an open wound which cannot be healed. Beverly Ayling-Smith’s work explores the way traumas such as bereavement may heal but they are always present as scars embedded in the fabric of our lives.
Gail Baxter PhD 2016
Title: Re-Viewing lace in archives: Connecting the lacunae
Gail Baxter’s contemporary lace practice interlinks many individual threads to form a coherent whole around the absences that are the essence of the fabric. The research contemplates the processes at work in the absorption of a group of privately collected objects into a formal museum collection. The objects and their provenances are assessed by the curator and archivist in order to plan a co-ordinated scheme for cataloguing, storing, retrieval and archival purposes. The individual object histories form sub-strands within the story that is being woven in the archive.
The lace demonstrates the multiplicity of potential ways of configuring such diverse strands in relation to the formal constraints of the archival grid. Many apparently random potential thread paths are manipulated and controlled according to a chosen set of working rules. Questions as to whether a pair of threads should be twisted to make them move in a certain direction or if they should travel through a different partof the pattern have much in common with decisions on where to place items taxonomically in a museum system.
Carol Quarini PHD 2016
Title: The domestic veil: exploring the net curtain through the uncanny and the gothic
The net curtain lies in the liminal space between the homely and the unhomely, and Carol Quarini uses it in this role as a metaphor for the uncanny and the gothic in the home, to re-read the domestic. The gothic, the uncanny and the domestic, are all concerned with boundaries and their unstable, permeable nature.
The uncanny describes the blurring of the boundary between the homely and unhomely. The gothic considers transgression and decay, and things that can be sensed but not seen. The domestic references the duality of the home as sanctuary and prison that developed in nineteenth century Britain.
Christine Day PhD 2021
Title: Drawing Water, Drawing Breath, Drawing Thread, the body as a transformative medium for the spation-temporal interpretation of the littoral in cloth
My understanding of epidemiology and anatomy offers a unique perspective through which to consider the materialisation of space and time. In fusing my clinical professional knowledge and skills with my creative practice, this research will explore ontology of space and time with reference to the Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of chronotope and unfinalisability and the Japanese aesthetic of Ma.
Denise Jones PhD 2020
Title: Embroidering and the Body Under Threat: Suffragette Cloths Embroidered In Holloway Prison 1911 - 1912
Cloths associated with British suffragettes 1905-1914, particularly those embroidered in prison, will be the focus of this study, situating the research within a discrete time frame and social space: a time-space of entanglement between women’s production of embroidery and the seeking of political representation. This research will seek to answer the overarching question, ‘Why did suffragettes embroider in prison?’ My experiential knowledge of embroidering and textile processes will inform the research throughout.