Community Makes a Nation: America’s Folly Cove Designers
Haptic & Hue
This summer marks the 250th anniversary of America’s founding as nation, born in a successful rebellion from the British crown. Events and politics tell us one tale, but textiles always give us another view. Much of the textile history of America is deeply painful – a story of enslavement and hardship in Victorian mills and garment sweatshops. But there is another side to this, because creating textiles for the home has always involved community, and throughout the two and half centuries America has been in existence, quilting, knitting, sewing and mending have been deeply social...
info_outline
Fashion and Pandora Dolls: How Style Travelled The World Before Printing and Cameras.
Haptic & Hue
There is a little mannequin which has played a hidden role in history. We admire the portraits of the great men and women of the past dressed in the height of fashion. But how, in an age without cameras or magazines, did they know what was in style? Step forward the Pandora doll, who may be as much as 3,500 years old. These miniature mannequins have played a role in communicating fashion down the centuries from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, through the Second World War, right up into the era of COVID. We know that the fashion dolls were owned by Mary Queen of...
info_outline
Finding A Foundling - Textiles of Identity
Haptic & Hue
In a small corner of London lies one of the most evocative collection of textiles anywhere in the world. The fabrics – which are quite ordinary - are in the so-called billet books which recorded the identity and clothing of every baby accepted at the Foundling Hospital from the mid 1700s onwards. What makes these books so moving is that often the birth mother left a scrap of cloth or ribbon when she gave up her baby. She held onto the other half so that if her circumstances changed, she could return to the Foundling Hospital, match the two pieces of cloth and reclaim her child. The...
info_outline
The Glorious Quilts of Gees Bend
Haptic & Hue
An extraordinary new exhibition has just opened in the small Alabama township of Gees Bend, and it gives us some clues as to why this community of world-famous quilters became home to one of America’s greatest creative legacies. The quilts of Gees Bend were first exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, nearly 25 years ago and today their quilts hang in many global art galleries. Since then the critics have repeatedly asked how an isolated community of Black American women could have prefigured many of the traditions of modern art without any formal training. These quilts were...
info_outline
Althea McNish - Queen of Colour
Haptic & Hue
It’s nearly five years since the Anglo Trinidadian textile designer, Althea McNish, died in near obscurity in London. In that time her reputation and her standing has grown dramatically and she is now recognized around the world as the one of the first black designers of international standing. There has been a retrospective exhibition of her work, the Victoria & Albert Museum highlights her work, and there is a biography of this remarkable woman in progress. Althea McNish as a designer was a magician of colour, a woman who brought the light and the hues of the Caribbean...
info_outline
The Dog Hair Blankets of the Coast Salish People
Haptic & Hue
Textiles have a tremendous power to hold our culture and identity, more so than most understand. For thousands of years the Coast Salish people of the Pacific North West, which straddles the border between Canada and the United States, made unique ceremonial blankets and robes from dog hair. Their woolly dogs long pre-dated contact with European colonisers and were specially bred for their lustrous coats. The coverings, which were woven or twined on looms, hold great meaning for the Coast Salish people and are at the centre of their sense of identity, and even lthough the dog hair is no longer...
info_outline
Hooky Mats and Rag Rugs: How the Art of Necessity Helped Define a Nation
Haptic & Hue
Hooked rugs are humble things made of recycled cloth and worn out textiles, originally born of need and lack: and yet they have come to mean much more to the communities that produced and enjoyed them. In America they have become an emblem of homespun pioneer thrift and self-reliance and an important element in the definition of a certain kind of national values. Handmade hooked rugs are the stuff of everyday life, but in Canada they became a vital form of income for impoverished seafaring families in Labrador and Newfoundland. And in northern England and southern Scotland they...
info_outline
The Intelligence of The Hands & The Creative Brain
Haptic & Hue
If you were asked to stitch a picture of your brain what would it look like? A project that looks at the connection between our hands and our brains asked people to do just that. It was aiming to measure creativity and to find out what impact skill and experience has on our actions? These are difficult questions to answer, but this episode of Haptic & Hue looks at what happens to us when we learn activities like knitting, sewing and weaving, how do our hands and brains work together, and which guides the other? About ten years ago a doctor in The Netherlands started what sounds...
info_outline
The Mysteries of the Marshes: The Ancient Textile Secrets of Europe's Bog Bodies
Haptic & Hue
If we need proof that textiles can rewrite human history, then it lies with the bog bodies of northern Europe. Textile archaeologists are revealing a whole new past about people who, in some cases, are older than Tutankhamen, but much less celebrated. Across northern Europe there are hundreds of bog bodies, who long ago were buried in marshlands and were preserved down the centuries by acidic conditions and lack of oxygen. We will never know all their secrets, but slowly we are discovering more about who they were, and how they lived. It is their textiles that bring us closer to them and tell...
info_outline
Reviving Rocking Stitch and Saving Wholecloth Quilting
Haptic & Hue
Here's a surprise! An extra episode of Haptic & Hue. We said we were taking a break for July and August and yes, we are. But we thought we would give you a taste of what Friends of Haptic & Hue sounds like and invite you to join the other podcast that we make every month. So here is the episode of Travels with Textiles that was uploaded for Friends in May this year, just as UNESCO announced that it was adding an old quilting practice to the list of crafts that have intangible cultural heritage status. Quilting in a flat frame with a rocking stitch has a history that...
info_outlineWho doesn’t love a good tartan? It is everywhere from high fashion catwalks to shooting parties on winter hillsides, from military uniforms on parade to much-loved old sofas. It is at home in the humblest of cottages and the most splendid of royal palaces. It has a kaleidoscope of different uses and meanings. It is one of the most recognised patterns on earth, a global textile, visible almost everywhere.
But tartan is much more than a pattern, it is a fabric of contradiction and surprise. It holds many meanings, often simultaneously. It can represent the establishment and the power of the state, and at the same time signify rebellion and treachery. It can be an emblem of enslavement and oppression, or it can represent comfort, family, and home. Its meanings are as diverse as its many patterns.
In this episode of Haptic & Hue’s Tales of Textiles, we look at where tartan comes from and how it acquired its many meanings and controversies, and why some people love it and others hate it. Tartan is a textile of duality, able to hold many ideas within its simple grid design. It has a history that has spread out across the world and taken a sense of what it means to be Scottish with it.
But there is more than history to tartan: we also hear from a bespoke kilt-maker, who designs and registers her own tartans. She creates modern tartans able to embrace new definitions of identity and community and expand far beyond the Highland glens they first sprung from.
All of this has been put into context by the first exhibition in living memory about Tartan in Scotland itself, which opened in April 2023 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, which we went to see as part of making this episode.
For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/