Outcomes - Seminar 3
Full transcription of delegate debate

Speakers:

• Janice Blackburn, Curator and Journalist
• Seminar Moderator: Dr. Veronica Sekules, Head of Education and Research, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, University of East Anglia

Introduction: Lesley Millar

Welcome. I’m really happy to see you here, and what’s been wonderful is the number of people who have attended the previous two seminars and now are attending this one as well. This rolling constituency was unexpected when we first started, it really does add to the continuity of the debate. So thank you very much.

Today I’m really happy to introduce to you Janice Blackburn who is curator of Craft and Design and a journalist. And she’s going to talk about her particular projects, the successes and the problems, and particularly her experience in that all her projects have been collaborative ones. She’s worked with Sotheby’s, Chatsworth and Liberty’s just to name three. And our moderator for the day is Dr Veronica Sekules who is Head of Education and Research at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and she’s also vice Chair of Engage, and those of you who don’t know what Engage is, it’s the National Association for Gallery Education.

As I’ve already mentioned, this is the second in a series of context and collaboration, but actually it’s the third because the first one accompanied the exhibition of Reiko Sudo’s textiles down at the University for the Creative Arts, in Farnham.

The second one, or the first in the Context and Collaboration series, was in Manchester in July, and you’ve all received by e-mail and in your packs the points that finally I extracted from the seminar in Manchester. From these I’d like to just now pull out three of those points. First of those points that jumped out for me is the importance of brokerage, how to bring people together. Brokerage is something that’s recognised more and more. I was in a meeting yesterday about something completely different, and again the term brokerage came up. When we’re speaking about collaborative initiatives it is that sense of who brings people together really, who is that catalyst? What is that catalyst? Is it an individual, is it an organisation, is it a museum, who is it? That’s also evidenced, which is again in your packs, by the extract from the Museums Association response to the NHRC, and what the second paragraph actually says. It appears that many museums are missing out on the benefits collaboration has to offer, because they simply do not know how to go about developing links. There is a need for one or more organisations to act as broker, bringing together potential partners. I think that’s really a key thing.

The second point that came out of the seminar in July was the importance of a champion, an organisation, a museum or a single individual. Peter Murray’s presentation, when he spoke about the setting up and running of YSP, was really revelatory for me, in understanding the importance of the role of a champion

And thirdly, the point that came up from Manchester was the one that emerged so strongly from the first seminar in Farnham, the issue of language. But this time the discussion about language was slightly different, it had a new edge to it, and edge is exactly the word. What emerged was the feeling that the language we use to describe what it is we do, either analytically, critically, and practically, was too soft, too furry and fluffy, and we need to be more robust in the way we describe what we do, when we criticise what we do. We don’t need to be timid. We are a strong and maturing constituency, and our debate should reflect this.

So on that note I’d like to hand over to Janice Blackburn for her presentation. Thank you.

(FOR JANICE BLACKBURN’S PRESENTATION Please go to Seminar 3 presentations)

Dr Veronica Sekules:

Thank you very much indeed, Janice. That was really wonderful and inspiring for our theme of collaboration, there are many, many areas of collaboration you dealt with. And indeed it is completely thoroughly imbued in your process and way of working, and very interesting to see the unexpected outcomes. And that seems to be a particular theme. And the challenging of expectations that seems to be a running theme in your work.

What we’re going to do now is to have some time for discussion, about an hour, and maybe to begin with we’ll address Janice directly and maybe you will have some specific questions for her. But then it would be nice I think to roam a bit more generally, and end up at the end of an hour with a list of themes that we’re going to take into smaller groups after tea, that are relevant.

But collaboration is our theme and context as well. So I wonder if we can start the ball rolling with some questions for Janice. Would someone like to begin? We have two microphones. When you are approached, if you could please state clearly your name and where you’re from and what today’s context is for you - whether you are an exhibitor or whatever

Pamela Johnson:

Pamela Johnson, writer, it seemed to me the last point you made is the nub of the day, knowing how to make the approach. And that seems to be something that needs, I would hope it gets really opened up, knowing how to connect your creative practice to another area that might have some interest, and it seems to be language, discourse and how you articulate that is important, whether it’s academic, commercial or museums. So I just throw that out and hope we can open that up.

Veronica:

So how to connect, how to make the approach. You mention language and discourse, as one element presumably.

Pamela:

I think what I’m trying to say is that in my experience perhaps the creative practitioner has often not best represented themselves. So it seems to me there’s an element of what’s been talked about here that a practical creative practice, an element in that, if one is wanting to collaborate, is a kind of self-reflexive element to that. In other words in understanding yourself and your connection to other areas of activity, whether they be Liberty, the commercial or the Sainsbury Centre or Tate Modern or whatever. But the need to understand the other’s needs and how to articulate what you have, and how that might connect to the other’s needs.

Can Janice please respond that because you have so much experience in dealing with practitioners. Do you find yourself representing them or do you …

Janice:

I’m not absolutely sure I’m the best person to answer this because I am a one-man band, and I have a particular sort of interest and I spot people that just appeal to me, whether it’s at a degree show or … an example I’ll give you is that I saw in Craft magazine a few months ago a tiny picture of something that intrigued me. It was a table with a dirty ashtray, a cigarette and a packet of cigarettes that said “cake is good for you”. It was like a Camel cigarette packet, but instead of the Camel cigarettes, it said “cake is good for you”. I then saw this was cake. I thought it was ceramics, it was cake, a sculpture in cake, and I with great difficulty, I found the name of the artist - Rachel Mount.

I got in touch with her and she had a studio in South London, and we had an e-mail correspondence that went on for about a month. She was a sculptor, a cake sculptor, and she put one of her sculptures for consideration to the Royal Academy summer show, and also someone from Vogue was writing an article about her. I said I’d love to do something with her, but I didn’t know quite what at the time. And particularly if your work, which is brilliant and I’m sure it will get accepted.

Her work was turned down by the Royal Academy so I got in touch with the Managing Director of Sotheby’s and suggested that when the sales are all over at the end of the summer and I know the galleries are just empty for a few weeks, would he let this artist have a gallery for free, for a few days? She’s wasn’t going to sell anything, and Sotheby’s were not going to make any money, will perhaps he would just give her the space just to show her work? He said, well it’s your responsibility and as long as we don’t have to do anything that’s fine. As it happened, because I knew the porters at Sotheby’s and we’ve all become great chums, they did loads for her. They printed invitations and posters, she had four days of free gallery at Sotheby’s to show her amazing cake sculptures, got loads of publicity, we didn’t sell anything but then I got in touch with Liberty and they are going to give her a show at Christmas time.

I think the Crafts Council should be doing this, I’m a one-man band and it’s not my profession to do it. I think this is what the Crafts Council should be doing. They should have somebody who is on the ball and doing this. I don’t know if they are. I suspect they’re not.

Pamela

They’re not going to do this, they don’t …

Janice:

But they could do it, someone’s going to have to do it.

Pamela

I thought we were here today to see how the textile community can advance that. So to sit here and just say, well, the Crafts Council should do it, is not going to take us forward, because I think the current state of the Crafts Council means that very little will come from that institution. Anyway I think I need to be quiet and let others speak.

Veronica:

I think maybe in a discussion that that might come up as an issue again, and it isn’t one we should avoid, but that maybe now is not the time, because we all know what the problems are. It was interesting your talking about people representing themselves when I was thinking about collaboration and what the necessary qualities are. The first thing that struck me was that one does need to be sure of what one is offering, otherwise, in a collaboration one is likely to maybe to lose oneself or diminish one’s input rather than increase it. I wonder if there might be a practitioner here who would like to speak to that and talk about how you represent yourself and where you start. Are there any particular experiences anyone would like to relate?

Julia Griffiths Jones:

I’m Julia Griffiths Jones, I live in West Wales, and I happen to know a museum in West Wales, and I have known the curator for a long time so I plucked up the courage this July to go and ask if I could work from her collection. And that’s as far we’ve got, we haven’t got any plan about outcomes or what’s going to happen, it’s just she’s going to let me quietly draw in her museum for a year or two years. I don’t know if that’s helpful or not.

Veronica:

So you’re building a relationship between the two of you.

Julia:

Yes.

Veronica

I think one of the things that would be interesting to talk about more are the relationships between institutions and individuals, and how those relationships might develop, because I think that came out of, it seems out of previous discussions a bit of an us-and-them feeling, where some institutions are enormous and hard to get through to, and if we’re looking at collaboration, that beginning of a process sounds like a very fruitful beginning.

Sue Lawty:

Hallo, I’m Sue Lawty, I worked with Bankfield Museum and the V&A in London. I would say it’s actually between individuals and individuals, that the more I worked with institutions, you’re actually not working with the institution, you’re working with the individuals within that. And I think that came very clearly across in the way that you’re talking about the collaborations that you’ve been involved with. It’s very much you talking to individuals and working with individual people, and so we might say the Bankfield Museum or the Bowes Museum or the V&A Museum, but actually it’s the people within that, that you’re working with. And I think when a collaboration works well, and when it grows, and grows beyond any … that any of you had any idea and I think it’s a great place to start is actually not to know what you’re going to do. I think it’s when you get on well and work, um, you kind of spark off each other, and so you put forward ideas, you both grow in confidence, um, and you’re not afraid to put forward ideas, and sort of rummage them around a bit and then have them be discarded or changed or developed or moved on. And it can grow in that way. But I do think it’s a very personal thing, and it’s down to individual people rather than the large institutions.

Janice:

Can I just say that is absolutely true, but a lot of artists, designers, crafts people that I’ve worked with just haven’t known how to go about it, and that’s why I say someone needs to help them, and that was what I was really meaning in answer to you at the back, that is their problem and a lot of particularly the young people are enormously talented, they know what they want to do, they know who they’d like to be in touch with, but they don’t actually know or they lack the confidence to do it, and they need someone to make the introduction, or give them the ability to make the introduction. That’s really what I was trying to say. There needs to be someone to advise them.

Sally Moss:

My name is Sally Moss and I’m the curator at the National Museum of Wales, and, I just want to say quickly about the collaboration that we’re going to be doing with Julia Griffiths Jones. Our collaboration has started with two jolly meetings, we’ve also, we’ve come a long way today so we’ve come to meet you but also to chat on the train. We got off at Paddington, it was very tempting I have to tell you to go to the Sushi bar and not come here at all, we could have done all our weekend shopping and just got back again on the train, so actually to spend time with somebody is incredibly important, and so far we’ve had a really good chat, so we’ll probably talk more about the project when we go back. But what I was going to say, we are perhaps in Wales in a very fortunate position. It’s a very small country and a very small community, so we are much more familiar with gentle, gentle collaboration than perhaps in other parts of Britain.

On the other hand, the disadvantage is, all the things that we do there you don’t know anything about, because nobody’s interested in what goes on in Wales so it has huge advantages but terrible disadvantages as well.

I wonder, for your purpose, and I don’t know how many more conferences and seminars you’re going to have, but you might find it quite interesting for us to plot our project for you and with you, because Julia is gently coming to us for a whole year, but then she’s got all kind of other things that we’re doing in the museum and different ways that we’re going to work with her and use her,

We’re going to be working with Julia on our website as well over the period she’s with us, and we’ve decided that during the time she’s with us to start with, that all the things we’ll do with her and that she does with us we will refer to as our little interruptions. So throughout the time you’ll see those interruptions.

And the last thing I think perhaps to say as well is, I’ve recently come back from the European Museum of the Year awards, and what was truly humbling was to go and meet people from thirty-five different European countries, it was very humbling actually to find out what they’re doing. You know, we have a tendency sometimes to think we do everything here, we’re very innovative, and that used perhaps to be the case. But one of the very nice things that somebody said to me there which was about collaborations with artists, is that when you actually work with an artist and you ask them to intervene with your collection, if you then ask them to show things with your collection you’re not only having a visitor in the sense of the artist, but also your collection is having visitors as well. And I quite like the idea that our visitors will see what a visitor has made, but they’ll also witness visitors having a conversation with the collection.

So I hope you’re interested in hearing how we get on, and perhaps it is a chance for us in Wales to say hello, you know, we are doing things there.

Veronica:

Yes, and I’m sure Lesley, she’s nodding, would be really interested and has a track record herself in tracking the process of collaboration between artists so maybe we can talk later about how to capture that.

Michelle Walker:

Through my own experience I found it useful to invite a curator to your studio, and that meeting, it may not take place straightaway, or they may come and … you haven’t got anything really specific in mind, but it just lets them see what you’re doing in the context that it’s produced, and I’ve actually found that a very useful experience.

Deirdre Figueiredo:

Deirdre Figueiredo from Craftspace in Birmingham. I just wondered if, listening to and reflecting on what Janice was saying, whether there is a 21st century model of patronage that we should be thinking about and developing, where, I mean, Janice’s success really seems to come from quite a number of years of building up trust between herself and Sotheby’s and, you know, the people that you work with, all those organizations and you’ve established that track record, and so you are in a position where you can get help and they will trust you enough to say, yes I’ll take the risk, and it is about that risk-taking isn’t it, so people aren’t that ready to take risks, and that’s where it’s difficult to make those partnerships and broker those, particularly for makers who are busy people doing creative things.

So I wonder if there might be more a strategic way of developing and sort of cultivating a certain type of new patron maybe who could have a different sort of role. They don’t have to be monetary people, they could be other sorts of people, who are very proactive and that could be something that could be funded if it was strategically done.

Veronica:

Yes, if you all could hear that, looking for new models of patronage I guess, based on the idea that trust is important in building up relationships. Maybe we’re looking for new models of collaboration, and maybe that is something you could hold onto for discussion.

Bob Martin:

Bob Martin, Craft Officer for the Arts Council of England in the Southeast. I have a question really. What do you expect the outcome of these collaborations to be, that is my real question, because I have funded collaborative practice for the last nine years, being involved in the Arts Council. It goes on and on. And yesterday I was talking to Andrew Tanner who’s been working with a company and I funded Andrew to work collaboratively with them They are reluctant to put Andrew’s name on a lot of the products that he’s designing for them, because they want to own it themselves. What I want to know is what do you expect that outcome from a maker to be? Are they moving their practice on, are they developing the practice itself, or are they developing an independent career for themselves somewhere along the line so they don’t become dependent on Arts Council money or Crafts Council support or whatever.

I was talking with Andrew and talking about how I funded people to do 100% Design, all those shows, Collect etc. and I just never know what the outcome of funding those people to be, except that they survive for another year and develop for another year maybe. And so we talk about ideas around how we can move that on, and I thought that was what this was about really, I thought this session was about that, how we move textiles practice on in some way, and I’m a bit confused because I can’t find a clue to where this thing is going to move on from just another talking shop.

In discussions with Andrew yesterday at 100% Design, I was saying we can continue just to fund people to make work to show, but how do we change that. Through that discussion we came up with ideas around the need to showcase people’s ability to design and innovate and influence, and so coming up with some shows like that. And I know that the shows that Lesley does, and I’ve supported Lesley’s work over the last number of years now, they’ve been trying to do that, but I still think somehow that those things just sort of end, in a sense. They have this show, they have the exhibition, and then it just ends and nothing happens, seems to happen afterwards except another one maybe or whatever.

I just want to know, how would you change that cycle, how would you break that cycle, and make it more positive for the maker in some way.

Veronica:

I think the outcome is intended to be to come up with some proposals for ways in which people can develop practice. I’m not sure that developing a practice in textile making is necessarily only or even the most desired outcome, because everybody develops in the way that’s appropriate for themselves. But I think maybe looking at collaborative practices and how they might operate between institutions, between individuals across different types of institutions and looking at a number of models for that, that might in itself create a changed way of working.

Bob:

Those things have gone on for years. Michelle’s doing Museum Maker, if anybody knows about that collaborative project, and we’re trying to develop that certainly in the southeast and London next and want to roll that out nationally if we can. You know, we are working towards those things but I’m not sure whether that’s still going to change anythin

Laura Hamilton:

I’m Laura Hamilton from the Collins Gallery in Glasgow. We work on collaborative projects a lot. Either artists come to us because they formed their own little group and they know exactly what they want to do. They want to work with each other’s media, they want to swap techniques, they want to develop their practice in different directions, and we’re always very keen to work with them. We also do a lot of thematic shows and I was interested to hear what Bob was saying on two counts. I don’t know where they all go either, but I think a lot of these exhibitions and these collaborations are simply to try and develop their work in their different direction and make new contact.

Sometimes it is profitable, sometimes it’s a complete and utter waste of time for everybody. A successful one we had recently, we had a fine artist move into glass, move into ceramic, move into textile. He creates his textiles in such a way now that through further collaborations we’ve just commissioned him for a large project installation in a law school. These people would never, ever have commissioned a painting, but they came to ceramics, and he was confident in that because he was new to it like everyone else and that emerged from a collaborative project which started in 1990.

Right now we are preparing for an exhibition which opens next Friday with eleven artists who have swapped disciplines. We’ve got five textile people who are all very professional, they live off their craft, in fact all eleven of these people are making a living from their craft, they are not dependent on grants or handouts from anyone. We got a grant for this project, it’s taken a year, and we’ve made a film documenting how difficult we have found it to buy time out of their normal practice and to experiment, and to swap each other’s disciplines, because they have orders from throughout the world, and with all the money and all the exhibitions and all the everything else that you can give them, they still have to at the end of this year project, still have to, you know, maintain their own practice which affords them a living. I’m very happy to put this wee film on the web when it’s finished so that people can add comments. We are also making a publication of the same. So as an experiment it’s quite interesting cos it’s a very frank account of what we’ve done.

Trish Bould: [no mike, very, very quiet and muffled]

My name’s Trish Bould and I’ve been working collaboratively with another artist for about seven years and I wanted to perhaps say that there’s lots of different ways of talking about collaboration. In my experience a good collaboration is very much a process, and the outcomes are very many, and one of the most interesting things I’ve found about collaboration is that the outcomes which are not about the product at the end of the day but about the knowledge gained about your own process and about the discipline and the approach from an educational point of view. But also I think we’re looking at the less tangible aspect of experiencing and thinking about the end product if you like is a distraction. If an artist is working in collaboration with an architect on a project, are they making an artwork within that architecture, or are they contributing to something else.

Veronica: [ no mike]

Valuable points there. I think the whole notion of the process and the product comes up again and again in educational terms, and whether one should be driving towards an outcome or supporting the process and letting it emerge. Seeing what’s going to happen and then letting something emerge from that. But also your idea of committing to another discipline and acting as a catalyst for something, is very interesting, and this came up quite a few times in what you were talking about, Janice, is acting as a catalyst in a situation to affect some change and make something unexpected. And I wonder if that is something that one looks for in a collaboration, that there should be an element of disruption in it somehow.

Trish?: [very quiet, no mike]

I guess that I would say some of the most interesting parts are the bits where things happen that you didn’t expect.

Veronica?: [no mike]

Unexpectedly.

Trish? [no mike]

Yes, and in the way that the more that you hold on to some sense of identity of what you want out of it, the more difficult it is to collaborate, because you’re not letting go to the possibility of something else.

Veronica?: [no mike, very muffled and quiet]

There is something here about conflict resolution, you know, if you get entrenched in a position then you’re going to come head on with each other. Also maybe something to do with the idea of language and what part that plays and how people negotiate collaborations, or is, or people who are working together as practitioners, i.e. working through your hands and eyes, non verbally.

Michael Brennand-Wood:

Michael Brennand-Wood. I’ve actually never had a problem with collaboration, I mean, most of my practice has been in collaboration with somebody, whether it’s someone who runs a gallery or an architect or a potential commissioner. And for me it’s always been a form of continuous education, and each situation is different. And, one aspect of that, that I think is slightly contentious, is the whole idea of where you get the funding to do certain things, so I think people have ideas, and often they have very interesting ideas, and one thing that worries me at the moment is that there is a sense that the granting authorities that appropriate the money for projects, have a lot of control in one sense over what those projects are.

And I think one of the things that we’re actually trying to do as a group of textile people is to share research, to document research, and to actually show the breadth and experience and depth, if you like, of our practice, and I think it’s really important that, um, if you have a good idea basically you can go to somebody and try and get funding for that, it doesn’t necessarily have to fit within certain kind of almost political constraints that exist at the moment.

So for me collaboration is clearly important, and I think it should be consistently inventive and I would hate to see a situation where collaboration becomes fixed in some form of aspic and there’s a model that’s produced that we’re all supposed to somehow, um, correspond to in order to get funding for a project.

Two other observations. I don’t think it’s within the Crafts Council’s remit to actually act as a private gallery for individuals. I think the Crafts Council’s done an exemplary job over the years in giving people starts and opportunities and promoting work, but what we really suffer from is there are no galleries that basically are any form of textile stable. So there’s a gap there, who are representing the textile people, who are trying to engage with collectives, and the like.

So, I think it’s both a funding and a representational problem.

Mary Schoeser:

Mary Schoeser. While we’re talking about language that what’s become clear to me is that we’re using the word collaboration to mean two completely different things. One is like a marriage, the economic view of a marriage, where you have bodies who are … I shouldn’t say bodies should I! … well, let’s say bodies, who are coming together, making an investment in a project in the expectation there will be mutual return. That’s the sort of thing where the Sotheby’s, the event, to the artist, the sale at the end, the sort of thing that Bob’s talking about, you know, the career, that sort of thing, the economic model. Then there’s collaboration which has to do with the process, which has nothing to do with that sort of economic bargaining. And something quite separate, that growing, learning sort of life experience.

So maybe one of the things we could get to today is to try and find, without too much forcing or artificiality, two separate words for those processes, just so that when we’re talking about them in the future we actually know which one of these sorts of activities we mean. Because I think they both have value, but they need their own word.

Veronica?: [no mike]

Perhaps we could think about how to develop, maybe by thinking about teasing out, what the elements are of those different types of collaboration, the form of vocabulary to describe them. How many other people here have been involved with sponsorship, with deals, with Krug champagne or Sotheby’s or whatever, from another perspective. Has anyone been commissioned?

Janice:

Well can I say that, using all those brands make it sound as if that’s what it’s all about, but with a lot of the things that I’ve done, the other side to it is that people have met other people through the exhibitions. So it’s also worked at that level, that there have been personal collaborations that have resulted from people meeting and who never would have met before, furniture makers with textile artists who have gone on to work together.

Veronica: [no mike]

Can we maybe move on a little bit to look at the question of context in collaborations.
What happens if people deliberately set a context that allows for collaboration, and I am reminded again of one of Lesley’s projects that provided comparison between practitioners in the UK and Japan. What happens when you provide a context that is unexpected, that throws a little bit of confusion into the collaboration, and then you have to deal with it. Is that something that you’ve had experience of, or might like to consider …………… …………….. …………..

Lesley Millar:

I would like to respond to Bob Martin. In terms of outcomes, you say you funded projects that I’ve done in the past, and you’re not sure what the outcomes are. The outcome today is the outcome of the previous project which the outcome of the previous project, because actually one leads to the next. And actually there isn’t an outcome from one project. It never ends. It always moves on to the next one to the next one and it’s a continuous build, and learning, and networking, and brokering between all the parties involved.

So today is an outcome from the very first one you funded back in 1996 ten years ago. What do I want from today, being the person who set it up?

I want some strategies, some suggestions from the communities here, constituencies that are represented here. You say, you know, what can we do about this to change it? I’d like to hear your suggestions for that, what we can do to change it, and everybody here, their suggestions that you could make. We know, as textile practitioners, it’s what Michael said, there are no galleries for textiles. How do we actually address that, how do we get the work out there, where do we put it? I would like to hear your suggestions for that, so that we can actually move that forward. We can maybe get textiles into those places, as a community, three communities, there are three communities here, the community of the textile practitioner, there’s the community of the museums and galleries, and there’s the community of the higher educational people. They are people who all can work together to actually promote and prioritize textile practice, and that’s what I would like the outcome to be, not only from today but from the final paper, and what goes forward to the AHRC.

Elizabeth Cooper: [no mike, very muffled]

Liz Cooper just about to start Farfield Mill. I’d actually like to throw the question back to Lesley. Do we think that if there should be gallery space and people representing textile spaces, should there be a textile fund or should be more of an arts environment with textile specialist representation. I’m actually, I’m picking up the point that Michael made at the last seminar about showing textiles within the textile environment. And I know that we want to, as people within the textile world, we want to have that sense of specialness, but how much do we want to isolate ourselves, or do we want to promote our practitioners’ work within a wider environment.

Lesley

I think someone else should respond.

Bob Martin:

Hi, Lesley. Lesley and I have had these conversations over the last few years, and Michael and I have had conversations about the gallery. I am concerned that the Crafts Council has closed down the gallery, I know the sector has quite vocally expressed that fear, that there’s not going to be that national outlet, but the Crafts Council are going to be working in other ways with the regions to develop opportunities to show people’s work, and that will come out locally in the near future.

I am concerned about the gallery situation in this country because I can’t actually name five galleries in London that actually make money selling craft, it’s really hard. You need somebody financially to back this situation, and that’s what it comes down to for me. You have to have finance behind it, no matter where that comes from, sponsor or whatever you want to call them, you have to have money behind it, for people to carry on practice. I feel about the craft sector, we’re under attack all the time, we’re a weak sector, we’ve lost the Craft Council gallery and that does concern me, but we need to fight back, we’ve got to have opportunities for exhibitions and selling those people’s work, because at the end of the day it’s a business for me, and unless the craft sector turns onto it’s a business, and art is a business, where a transaction goes on, you make a piece of work, you put it on show, you sell it, and then you are able to make another piece of work.

Unless the craft sector wakes up to that and gets onto it on a financial basis, we’re just going to drift and drift back down into, sorry, any museum people, into the heritage sector here, and we’re going to be sitting there in the rural crafts, like, you know, spinning cotton and whatever, like, you know, and there’s the little weaver in the corner and there’s the little silversmith.

We have to use the expertise that our colleges are pumping out every year, every year I go to new designers or whatever and thought, oh my god all this money that’s wasted and what happens to those people? What support do we give them afterwards, where do we go with them? I really believe we’re wasting so much money with producing these guys and we do very little with them afterwards. The Arts Council tries in its way to develop people’s practice and that’s what we fund, we fund people to develop their practice so there are opportunities out there. The number of people sitting in this room that I supported, I’ve been involved with them, funded a skills exchange in Europe. That is really, really hard and that’s from a funder point of view, to get those exchanges going, it can take about three years to get the money together to do exchanges, it’s hard work. And I haven’t got the time!

Unidentified speaker: [no mike, very quiet]

I was just going to question the whole meeting thing because I generally worry about the words, because there are loads and loads of galleries and museums actually showing textiles. You just don’t call it textile, because it’s a huge turn-off for a contemporary art visitor, to young people. We show fine art, 11 times out of 12 shows a year, where we don’t use these words knitting, sewing, stitching, embroidery and the difference is phenomenal, we just finished a show which had a lot of textile in it, but we didn’t use the word textile, we show any medium you like. But I worry very much about the textile label.

Veronica: [no mike]

If I might just respond because actually at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art we have the opposite experience, that any textile exhibition we show has naturally a huge audience, mainly because there are a lot of practitioners in the region. People are very hungry for it, and I have seen that abroad as well, and it’s also subversive in a really interesting way, people quite angry. And we should use that and go to the heart of that.

Greer Crawley:

Hallo, I’m Greer Crawley from Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, but I also have another hat, so to speak, which is, I’m with the Society of British Theatre designers and I’m working on the committee for the national exhibition of theatre design to be held in January, and our theme is collaboration! So I’m here with my notes for the catalogue on collaboration and I actually have an article one of my colleagues has written about her collaborative project that she’s just done with London Bubble, just recently, working with a variety of artists to produce this site-specific performance that took place throughout London in the spring.

One of the things that I’m really interested in, and I agree with Janice, is that I am constantly looking for people to put together, and to set up interesting projects, from all sorts of disciplines. Now, most of the time I try to look at as many exhibitions, magazines as I possibly can, but I can’t look at everything. And there are certain ones that are regular features that I always look at. Time Out is one of them. Now, if there’s an interesting exhibition I don’t care whether it’s textile art, whatever it’s called, if the image is great, and I think, god I want to know more about that artist, I get on the internet, get to the gallery, you know, print out the pages, then find out more about the artist, go along to the exhibition if I possibly have time, and say to one of my, say, theatre design colleagues, you should look at so-and-so’s work, I think it would really work with your project, your dance performance, or whatever.

And I know a lot of people are doing this, they’re coming together this way, but, you know, I’m just one person, bringing it together, hopefully through the national exhibition our catalogue and it’ll go to Prague and then it will tour Britain. People who come along to it will see collaborations between textile artists, fine artists, whatever you want to call, but I think … I want to know more about the work you’re doing, but I have to say I’m not going to look at specialist textile magazines, to find out about it, I don’t have time to do that, I’m looking at everything else, plus doing all this other work, so, you know, I want to see this work so how are you going to get it to me? How are you going to show me? I look at Vogue. Vogue’s great, you know, but look at Vogue this month, and look at the artists who are being illustrated in Vogue. Just, as you said, little images, but you go, wow, Jason Shulman, you know? I want to know about him, you know.

Janice:

I totally agree, I mean that’s how I do it. You keep your eyes open when you walk past a shop, I mean I nearly get run over everyday because I’m so busy, and in the most unlikely things, places, and then you follow it up. That’s the way it happens.

Pam Johnson:

Yes, just to pick up, it leads on into what was said before, about using the T word, and, this is a real problem, and I think it’s one that practitioners have to kind of resolve for themselves, about themselves, that if you define yourself within a kind of parochial community that exchanges ideas around technique and tradition and all of that, then you’re kind of turning your back … it’s difficult, there’s so many constituencies here, but you’re right, if you’re going to go out into the world, then you go out leading with what your ideas are, what it is beyond textiles that you communicating.

I think we’ve had so much evidence, now, over the last ten years throughout the fine art world, that, on and on, people using fabric, enough exhibitions in that fine art context where it’s not called textile art, it’s art, and it just happens to be using textile. This is something that just goes round … I’ve had this debate, I’ve said these words over and over and over again. And that’s the loop that needs to be got out of, exactly what this lady said here, that are we deserving something called textile art, or is there interesting work that has ideas that can be communicated beyond the space of the textile world?

Victoria Mitchell:

Victoria Mitchell, Norwich School of Art and Design. I think I’m developing a little theory here on the basis of various things this very interesting discussion. Textile is never going to be as demonstrative it seems to me as fashion. Textile can be noisy but it’s never going to be as noisy as fashion. But it does infiltrate it, it has infiltrated kind of extraordinary ways into the thinking of other disciplines. But, just really from the person on my right and Pam, this idea of kind of the small circle and the large circle I think is quite interesting. Textile artists and designers and makers have often collaborated with art, with fashion and performance, with furniture and interior, with museums and histories, and where it’s been possible but always rather more difficult, with architecture sort of at the edge of that kind of intimate circle.

But then in this wider field of inter-disciplinarity, textile as a mode of knowing and seeing and thinking and making, has a place within a much more dynamic field in which we might include science, philosophy, language, poetry. I was talking to a professor of poetry the other day and showing them some of my students’ work, and he was kind of in ecstasy suddenly realizing the relationship between text and textile. I think something Pam was referring to is about communication. I just think that education, higher education is very valuable, a place to demonstrate the kind of true collaboration with, for example, in the visual arts departments and other kinds of forms of knowledge.

I was thinking about the Wellcome Institute as being a kind of facilitator, who might provide some sort of support for those kinds of collaborations, bringing together design and inspiration and innovation. It’s getting those other interest groups aligned to be aware of the potential of textile. It isn’t going to be loud, at the forefront, but quiet determination is infiltrating, I think it can end up making quite a song and dance and make noises in place where funding might be more forthcoming than it currently is.

Janice:

Can I just, just to add something that occurred to me about how difficult it is to be seen that textiles is not sexy and everyone gets turned off. When I curated the Caroline Broadhead show it was picked up by the Guardian as exhibition of the week, with a featured image of work in cloth so there was no fear or dread of textiles. But we didn’t go out and say, hey folks, this is a textile show, other things were put to the fore. So I don’t think there is this fear of textiles, if presented in a certain way.

Veronica?: [no mike]

Personally I don’t quite understand the problems. Katherine McFarland who a lot of you will know, who we showed a couple of years ago and she always says it’s the first thing that people experience, the first thing that happens to you in life is you’re wrapped in textiles, everybody has experience of. And I feel that people who work in textile in some ways ought to be envied in that they are working in a discipline that is universally understood in lots of ways, but it is the quality of the ideas, I think you’re completely right, that is crucial

Veronica: [no mike]

I’d like to suggest that we being to think about how we’re going to move into talking in smaller groups where some of the things might be talked about in more depth, and, I am going to suggest, that we have an overall aim: how can collaborative approaches be applied, where and by whom. How can collaborative approaches be applied in order to effect change. And then in certain areas, and we maybe pick out certain areas, looking at inter-disciplinarity, working with institutions, using language, working across the cultures, looking at the personal and political.

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NEW SESSION

Anon:

In our group we discussed the success of projects and the quantity of outcome of projects. Borderline areas involving frictions and unpredictable situations from cross-cultural working. Motivation and the routes to making, through self-taught practice, professional routes to practice, critical discourse and community. Textiles as an accessible way to introduce more challenging ideas to people.

The emphasis on varying status of textiles artists in other cultures, and then the generational culture, cross culture, youth culture and communication between existing visual culture and youngsters.

Basically what we decided that we would concentrate on in the end would be, understanding the culture of the next generation, what they live now, and engaging with them, eliminating barriers and boundaries between the textile arts and the youngsters. So that the same way that they eliminate all boundaries in their music, we’ve got to try and do the same thing in the visual arts.

Our outcome. We’re going to try to remove our own assumptions and listen to what the youngsters are doing, listen to what they experience, and then work with them, in a mutual more sophisticated framework and structure, to include critical context and reflective context. That’s it, in a nutshell.

Veronica:

Thank you very much. Group 2, institutions and inter-disciplinarity. Who’s talking to that?

Anon:

We talked a bit about what we meant by inter-disciplinary, and it was a mixture of things from whether something was craft fine art, fine art craft, but we moved swiftly on because I think we were really more interested in a wider context. We talked about perhaps not making divisions so much about keeping the freedom, well this might be my personal vision, um, and how there is a question of language but a desire really to keep an open mind.

We talked about the individual, and individuals like Lesley Millar, like Janice, the writers, people like Pam Johnson, ambassadors in a sense, and we came up with a model, impresario or producer, which there are, just recently been appointed five people to have a research period to effect some big projects in the next five years. All five are from the performing arts, and I think that to have a model like that, within fine art craft, to get some fantastic textile-related projects out, in this country, with national and international artists would be a brilliant thing to push forward.

This model is a national Arts Council pilot and these five individuals have just been appointed and they’ve got two years time, two years to think and develop. And we also thought about two people getting together so the actual model could be the collaboration in itself, so you could have someone working from a dance movement background with a fine art curator/writer, who would then introduce new artists to different audiences. That was sort a sub idea.

And it was, from my point of view working in an institution it’s important that person isn’t from an institution, but has got contacts with them, because that person’s got to be an individual and be able to go and network, and they could take time out from an institution and have that background, but they would be a brilliant networker, and they wouldn’t necessarily see boundaries between commercial and museum and university, they would see all the potential for collaboration.

Veronica:

Right, thank you very much. Group three, inter-disciplinarity again. Interesting to see the variations.

Anon:

We kept a fairly open definition of inter-disciplinarity. The question was really why, and we felt to do with the greater possibilities of creative opportunities that come out of that and ongoing creative opportunities that come out of that. It leads into more knowledge-based culture, because of the way culture is developing. The need to place work in a wider dialogue and wider critical constituency.

It’s also a question about those opportunities not only generated from the craft constituency but also from other sorts of constituencies, developing that work into a wider level playing field. We felt there was a need for that to happen right from within higher education, and all the problems really of craft courses, all the different courses, and the lack of communication including within staff, all that came up with our group, really.

And I think the importance really for students to be able to network, and opportunities for them to network the moment they leave college and to continue. We felt the need for people who can broker opportunities, and also the need for advocates within media and cultural worlds.

I was interested in the recent Selvedge magazine that Peter Greenway writes about the collaboration he had with a Japanese textile designer that he works with and in some ways it’s far more interesting for me for it to come from somebody like him who’s a film maker, than it might be from a curatorial craft critic. So there’s a need to really to develop those advocates, which has been talked about already.

We also talked about the need for PR and marketing, much more significant PR and marketing in those opportunities when they come up. When Lesley develops her exhibitions, they have somebody working with PR right from the beginning who’s involved in all that planning process, in order to have the widest critical review of the work.

Veronica:

Thank you very much, and language that was interestingly different from the other group too. Language and labeling, next one, four.

Anon:

We spoke about labeling and what professional practitioners or people that work within textiles might call themselves, our thoughts were that you should just call yourself whatever you want to in whatever situation you might find yourself in and not be bound by kind of titling, but there was also in our group a strong feeling about keeping textiles as the kind of bedrock, and it was something that, where your roots were, and it would be part of the discourse but wouldn’t stand in the way of other things you might want to do, so it wouldn’t always be in the front of what you were doing, you wouldn’t be kind of blinded and dominated by process, but the textiles would be in there somewhere as part of your kind of inner being. Have I covered everything, Paul?

Paul Harper:

Well, we were really speaking about practitioners making a positive contribution to the discourse, rather than letting other people speak for them.

Veronica:

We might come back to that in terms of collaboration, though, and people taking their part in the whole enterprise responsibly, I think it’s often the case that practitioners are pushed out there, and left to talk to themselves. The last group which is research and process.

Anon:

Our group talked about research more than anything else. That research was generally collaborative, and so the whole measure of research was linked to collaborative practice. We had lots of discussion about how that could take place, and what we did come up with were three types of things that we could do. The first one is to create some form of networking system similar to the British Library educational model, which allows people to actually communicate across different networks and actually talk to people not just within the discipline but actually to sort of network, really, and that could be … it could take many different forms.

The second point was that we felt that both within education and within some of the sort of curatorial practice, that we needed to support more open-ended research. That means research that didn’t necessarily have a final conclusion or ending that we could identify. And then that was communicated not just within the sector, but outside the sector, and that we had the command and the language to talk about that outside the sector.

And the final point links to the first one, that we should consider how we might develop some form of route map or some form of communication device that talks about all these things going on, as they are going on, not as something in the past or historical.

And that led to the idea of how the debates and discussions can both be formal, in a sense like here, and also informal, for example blogging and communicating on train stations and meeting people there.

Anon:

The idea was that the British Library educational model was a process where you could enter the library itself physically, and you could set up communication with different people within different disciplines. So you weren’t necessarily talking about textiles, or craft, you were talking about the ideas that you were exploring, and therefore you could make networks to different people that way. So it was much more about the ideas, and how you could network other people - if you wanted for example to look at engineers or bridge-builders.

Anon:

Our group was talking about products and making, we were all relatively young artists and we were talking about it from the point of view that there’s a lot of pleasure in having exhibitions and collaborating or working with curators, and that that sort of is almost at this stage half the joy of doing it, but that it would be nice if also we’d make money, from having these exhibitions. It’s almost like the first goal is have the exhibition, and then, the next goal seems a bit out of reach sometimes, you say, oh, can I sell it as well?

It would be nice not to just see that, that massive hurdle of getting shown, and getting work out there which we’re sort of struggling and working to do, but also that we’re going to sell it too. We also discussed the different approaches in Japan, where the artist has to rent the gallery space. And that sets up a different kind of expectation because in renting it, you are expecting to sell as well, because you’ve paid out the money to rent it, but that is a completely alien way of thinking for many artists in this country.

Anon:

Picking up on that point of renting a gallery and therefore gallery space, and therefore, expecting to sell. One of the things that strikes me as the hardest thing of all is getting people through the door, i.e. the promotion, the advertising, you’re only going to sell something if you’ve got people in who see that work. And one of the points that I don’t think has been touched on today, particularly, and does intrigue me, Janice in her talk touched on aspects of the importance of retail in contemporary society, the importance of visual merchandising, and promotion. And we, well, I certainly responded when those brand names went up, and you had that visual indicator there straightaway. When you had that illustration of the visual merchandising installation within a store context.

I think these things, branding, promotion, publicity, we’re living in an environment where these are hugely active dynamic aspects of cultural life. And if we don’t engage with those as an essential part of the total aspect of practice, then we run the risk of being left behind, you know, things are changing so rapidly, the emphasis is changing so rapidly, and I’m not aware that there is any particular vehicle at the moment that you could say to your textile students or, take it out from textiles, where you say to your students, look at these promotional aspects. There are a lot of business courses and a lot of business studies, book keeping, setting up that aspect is covered, and the reason why this has become of interest to me is, I’m having to teach at the moment textile retail management students. I say having to. But it’s become a really very active challenge, and it’s a really dynamic area, because you have people who are interested in design, they’ve gone through the textile design degree route for a certain point, they have worked out that they don’t want the life of a maker or a designer, though that is very important to them within their soul, and they are taking this retail route along.

So it’s a challenge to me to see how one can bring these promotional aspects, exhibitions, there isn’t a division now. If you look at some of the best visual merchandising, OK it’s sort of plagiarism really, but they will see a fantastic exhibition and they’ll use some of those idea within that.

So I just would like to flag up the importance I think of this retail promotional aspect of work.

Anon:

Maybe there’s a need for a textiles academy like that and selling, promoting textiles.

Gerry Howie:

Gerry Howie, I’m a PhD student. I’d like to come in with another perspective because as we were working in groups we all had differing opinions about what we felt about collaboration, and they were all very interesting, but, one of the things that I thought to myself I needed to pick up on was from the Manchester seminar, where they talked about resonance and wonder, and our conversation actually turned into something really quite interesting because the museum curator started to talk a little bit more, and we felt really that we could have done with just a bit longer, because it was really interesting to see their point of view. And I just feel that it’s not just about money, you know, when it comes to things, I just really would love to see more people talking to each other about the wider issues, if you like.

Anon:

There was a lecture at the RSA recently and it was about visual literacy, and I was interested in their take on looking at young people and how young people are seen in so many images and their visual culture nowadays. There was somebody from creative partnerships there, if people know about creative partnerships, and someone who was now going to be head of education at the Tate I think. And she was talking about obviously teaching visual art as well as crafts in part of that creative partnership agenda, and how they were reaching kids who were not academic through tactile engagement or whatever, and we started talking about, Deirdre’s project with the tactile engagement with kids as young as six months, and how important that might or not be, and said, well, should be we doing that? Should we just not let kids grow up in this new visual world and not be interested in tactile engagement?

Anon:

In a sense it started the conversation amongst the group about how we’re in a visually image-dominated situation now that’s fast-paced and quite critically sound, and how can information be disseminated that way. It’s actually raising the game in terms of being more sophisticated about how we work with young people. And in spite of the kind of visual culture that they’re growing up with, means that we’re not getting people interested in physics, chemistry and maths, but actually in some of the projects we’ve been doing with babies, is engaging them in a way that actually might encourage them to become physicians, mathematicians and scientists, so, you know, textiles has that role as well.

Veronica:

I’m interested also to pick up on the group talking about or to raise the question of practitioners leading the discourse, and what that means, and whether that means you want to talk, what kind of discourse you want to lead. This is something I know that Peter Dormer who was the fellow at UEA was always very interested in, practitioner discourse and the language and the innate kind of language and the tacit knowledge of practitioners. Are you talking about that being made explicit? Or, are you talking about a critical discourse, are you protecting yourself from outside discourses? What’s going on there?

Paul:

I think that it’s important that we talk about whatever is important to us, and that we find points of contact with other disciplines and other kinds of practices, so I think that collaboration is a very important part of that. And I think makers have tended not to talk, or, they’ve tended to enter into a discourse between themselves or between people who are telling them what it is that they need to talk about. And so there’s a kind of rarified kind of discourse that goes on, that only really engages a few makers, and most people feel excluded from, and disempowered by, even.

I’ve been in the southwest, where I work, I’ve been running a series of events where makers have been encouraged to talk about the things that are important to them. The challenge for me and for the people who have kind cohered around those events, is how we then carry that outward. I felt it was really important to start to develop an environment where people felt confident to talk about what was important to them, but I think that it is important to move out from that now.

In my experience, practitioners don’t have difficulty in finding the language, it’s really about feeling confident about the language which they’re familiar with and which they’re comfortable with, and I think that it’s, you know, one of my things is that it’s usually a poetic language rather than kind of the language of discourse, a theoretical language.

Mary:

Paul has already said part of what I was going to say. I think that many makers feel that they have to come up with what my extremely critical and helpful partner calls blah blah blah big word big word big word. Whereas in fact they don’t. The context and collaboration website has wonderful examples of really articulate writing, and I’m sorry I can’t remember their name, by someone who said: I’ve never done this before, I’ve never written like this, really articulate.

I think it’s a case of not being fooled into thinking that you must use certain words, even the words that are circulating here now, but actually using the ones that resonate with you, and I would like to say that I think an example of that in a positive way this can be carried out, is the projects like Sue Lawty’s diary on the V&A website, which actually just gives you that real sense of the process kind of collaboration, where you are really just following someone through their thought process. Oher websites have been mentioned and I think that’s something that we could support.

Veronica:

I’d really like to draw our attention back to the comment that’s been made is, is the debate that we’re having, is the language that we’re using, actually robust enough? Are we being too polite to each other when we’re actually talking about the work in a critical context or whatever. I know it’s about confidence, perhaps the makers don’t feel that they’ve got the language. But it’s creating that kind of language which is robust, which has that dynamism. It’s a physical language, yes. Go ahead, Nick.

Nick Gorse: [no mike, very quiet]

I think one of the things that’s really quite important is that we don’t patronize makers, I think that’s really not the right thing. I think what we need to do is allow the makers to state the nature of their practice within their own language. One of the things that we should not do is artificially separate writing from making and consider how writing is also a creative practice where writers can have collaboration between writer and maker that wasn’t about the writer writing about the maker. Actually a collaborate arrangement, working together.

So again I think what is really important I think is that we listen to makers we should just let the people talk, let the language talk itself, and we need to give the space to do that.

Victoria:

I beg to differ. From the rarefied corner. [laughter] In relationship to your discussion, two incidents come to mind, and one is being asked by a well known practitioner to write an essay, and being paid to write the essay, but then in all the publicity actually being excluded. So that there’s a kind of a dialogue, but the dialogue gets lost somewhere so it doesn’t extend outside of a closed world. And the other is somebody saying to me, it’s really interesting what you wrote, you really must push that writing outside of the textile community. It’s no good keeping kind of those discourses to yourself, in this enclosed network of association. We want other interested groups needs to hear these things. So exchange is very important and networks and allowing different kind of value systems to interpenetrate. But writers are makers too, and we make, together we make the thing happen and extend beyond a narrow circle.

Veronica:

We have touched on the idea of marketing and cultural advocacy and PR, networking systems. One thing that I wanted to hear more about is the kind of impresario producer. That seemed like something that we could build on, at least to be made more explicit about what you meant about that role and how to play it, and, who is the impresario and is that another role for the artist or is that somebody working alongside the artist, is that another kind of collaboration, and where do you look for, to create that?

Maggie Henton:

Maggie Henton. Practitioner. I’m also here on behalf of the 62 group. I worry thatmakers are being pigeonholed and put in a little box, over there, and we don’t have anything to do with any of the other bits that encompass an art practice. And they are all crucial. We were speaking about the inter-disciplinary and the inter-disciplinary is absolutely essential to an artist’s practice.

Gerry Howie:

I’m Gerry Howie again and yes I completely agree with that. You cannot marginalize an artist because they have no control. They need to develop their work in the wider context, not just as a maker. They need to grow as a person as well.

Anon:

It’s not necessarily a case of marginalizing, it’s actually collaborating.

Anon:

I think that actually it often does amount to marginalizing, though, because I think often in collaborations the artist is the junior partner. I’m thinking about all kinds of collaborations, if you think about public art commissions for instance, very often you’re working with a number of different professionals and the artist is quite often sort of patronized and treated as the little bit of window-dressing, the decoration. But it’s the artist who will deliver the projects on time within budget and will have something personal invested in the project, when everyone else has kind of run over budget.

Veronica:

I mean I have to say ’twas ever thus. I mean part of me is a medievalist and I wrote a book about medieval art. There’s a chapter about artists, and there are lots of images of artists at the bottom of towering structures, supporting them, crushed. The artist was a servant to the community. But working in a thoroughly cross-disciplinary way, and then there was no illusion about the creation of a work of art was collaborative, the maker was part of a system, that brought it into being. And in a sense that hasn’t changed.

Bob White

Bob White. There is a model for collaboration that LM uses which is the formation of a team of designer, pr, etc. who support both the artists and the dissemination of ideas. The other model is the commercial one, which is that of a commercial gallery supporting an artist as one of their stable and all difficulty of agreements and percentages which can take place.

Veronica:

Good. Thank you. There is a role maybe to be played by higher education. The role of higher education in training artists has probably changed that culture in the last ten years, and is there something that higher education can continue to do, by monitoring, by keeping up relationships with artists in later careers, to continue to raise the status. Is there something to be said there? And indeed through research. Would someone like to talk from the perspective of higher education about the role and the potential role for artists, for collaborations, contexts. Or should we just leave it there? Yes.

Anon:

That interesting definition between the agent and the gallery and the sort of independent, more free-spirited thing. It just struck me actually as one of the baseline reasons that we separate art from craft, we see the craftsperson as someone who soldiers on on their own and doesn’t have the agent, but as someone has commented earlier in one of the groups, textile designers are quite used to having agents.

I go into lots of institutions and I see spaces, little display spaces in hallways, galleries, things like that. It would be lovely to see a kind of smash and grab attitude, where exhibitions aren’t so formally proposed, where there isn’t all the bidding, the whatever, and where students get to do it once in their three or four years. Instead they get to pick something, put it up and … Or staff. What I mean is, there is a lot of space. We’re talking about the lack of gallery space, but actually there is a lot of space, small spaces, tiny spaces that could be stolen to just constantly renew the engagement with real objects, changing series of real objects, that can never change as quickly as the web presence does, but can actually begin to reinforce that idea that objects are things that are important as part of our diet, our aesthetic diet. And museums could do the same thing in fact, too. There’s lots of space out there just being used perhaps in a way that’s more formal. Maybe we could look to use its spaces as the web uses its spaces, just little flickers, just half a day, a day, you know, so that if you miss it, tough.

Veronica:

But if it happens regularly enough and is constantly changing then it can build up dialogues and knowledge and exchange ideas. Yes?

Anon :

Returning to that sort of promotional theme that’s obsessing me a bit at the moment, talking about what research in higher education can offer, I think one of the things that one can do in relation to textiles is, take the message out to communities beyond us, which we’ve all touched on in different ways. What I’m saying now is not sort of helpful for wide dissemination, but I’m just conscious that the last paper that I gave, I chose to do it at Ruskin College Oxford in a public histories conference, whereby it was taking things that had come from textiles as the central issue, to that other audience, and then the next one, that I’m doing at the moment, is the Australian Cultural Studies Association, again, so I think what higher education can offer academics is not just the time to think about some of these issues, but then go and take those issues out to perhaps restricted but other academic audiences, so that’s another aspect of the stream of promotion.

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