Cloth & Culture NOW
the artists - Sue Lawty, UK

Embedded and Released

Running over the high moors: primal, fundamental contact with air, wind, rain, mist, sun, warm, cold, ground… so good to be out of the studio.

The physical, rhythmic repetition of body and breathing helps focus thinking. Head tussling with the now, feet pounding the past. Ancient tracks, narrow ‘causeystone’ paved paths; worn witness to centuries of weavers carrying cloth to market - the passage of their feet and now mine literally imprinted on the  gritstone. 

Textile history is writ large on this land.
The emergence and growth of textiles and my attraction to live and work here are both as a direct result of the Pennine landscape. Dramatic, steep hills and deep valleys shaped the wool industry and, in turn, have been shaped by it.

Here are high fields full of sheep and an abundance of soft water for washing and power. Since the Middle Ages, rows of narrow, stone mullioned ‘weavers’ windows (built into the cottages to allow more light into the dark interiors) attest to the endeavour of the hundreds of individuals who carved a living from their handlooms. The Piece Hall where once they took their pieces of cloth to be sold to merchants is, today, an art gallery.

In summer we go up to the open moorland and swim in the reservoirs. They were built to ensure an even flow of water to power the mills which permeate the valley bottoms. We have watched the tall stone chimneys that were once such a feature of this post industrial revolution landscape, being felled – only a few remain. And the children learnt to ride their bikes by the canal that once carried the coal in and the cloth out across these hills.

My own studio is typical of the indigenous architecture. Built into the steep hill, it is accessible at ground level at the back yet three stories up at the front. I look out across the valley at row upon row of similar, tall, four storey ‘top & bottom’ houses stretching up the hillside; built by the Victorians to accommodate mill workers. And Bankfield Museum (where in 2004, I had my first solo exhibition for twenty years) was once the grand residence of a wealthy mill owner. It now houses a most superb collection of textiles from all over the world.

I see all this everyday. It is familiar. It is normal. In truth, I don’t think too much about it most of the time. Yet this archaeological mirror of history provides constant subliminal context. As someone who weaves, I find myself embedded within it: inevitably part of the continuum of woven textile history. And yet, by being born in the middle of the 20th century, I am, in part, released from it.

Choice

I think the ‘release’ comes in the guise of choice.

It is only having reached a certain maturity that I am now able to look back and see how fortunate it is to have been born in this country in the fifties. Post war ethics and frugalities would have surrounded me at home, at school, in my environment. As a child, I just accepted that ‘this’ was how life was. I didn’t question it. I didn’t notice it. Simultaneously (as beneficiaries of other’s battles), we have grown up with the notion that determination can make anything possible. With hindsight, this seems an apposite era from which to have developed as a creative person.

The feet of our generation are firmly rooted in the resourceful, ‘make do and mend’ culture of the 50’s, while our heads have been exploded by the exponential growth of communications and possibility. We have stepped through the decades often hanging onto the coat tails of technological development: our years concurrent with its expansion. I was the last child in my class to have a television and can still recall the excitement our first (huge, bakerlite) telephone and being connected through the operator. Today I am able to exchange messages with someone in Australia as quickly as if they were just down the road. And it’s taken for granted that we can find out almost anything we want to (and a lot more!) in 0.09 seconds! We have the world at our fingertips.

At home, I made things with whatever was at hand. I can remember, even then, seeking out interesting textures and colours. In the garden shed I found a tangled knot of ‘binder twine’ (the traditional, natural thread that used to be used for tying up bales of straw). I disentangled and coiled it into some kind of hat. I saved stones and fruit pips and bits of hessian for various projects. I made collections. Instinctively, I followed my nose. I knew next to nothing about the world of art and it never entered my head that there might be others making similar things elsewhere.

My mother taught me to knit and to sew. Not content with the patterns available, I constantly altered and changed them (often with disastrous results). I also have vivid memories of mum repeatedly unpicking some piece of stitching or other until she was completely satisfied with the result, or working all night to have a garment finished by a morning deadline. Almost by osmosis I was learning not to accept second best. In a recent clear out, I found it impossible to throw away old dressmaking patterns from my youth – feeling surprisingly emotionally attached to them. They have become the basis of a new work exploring text and textiles.

My father showed me the world – the world of subtle detail… under a stone…  in the middle of a flower… in a rock pool. And he made me very aware of the spaces in between things: how the negative shapes created between letters say, were as important as the letters themselves. He taught me to look. I would say that my upbringing has had a profound influence on what I do, why I do it and my work ethic.

Tapestry

I grew up under the impression that the large medieval tapestries, so familiar in the stately homes of Derbyshire, were quintessentially English. (Context has a lot to answer for.) Large expanses of bluish battle or hunting scenes seemed synonymous with these grand houses. Hardwick Hall, just a stone’s throw from my house as a child, has many fine examples. Then, as now, I was rather put off by the subject matter, choosing instead to home in on the exquisite detail. I later learned that these were probably woven in Arras or Tournai. However insular our personal history, our choices are contextualised by world history.
 
At art school, I followed a degree in Furniture Design yet I could feel a passion rising for tapestry from the moment I first had the opportunity to weave. I loved the taught, parallel warp threads, the deep satisfying thud of beating down the weft, the smell, the feel, and the mutual bond of structure and image.  I would avidly seek out anything that was woven tapestry - hungry for knowledge.

Transition

But it was Jack Lenor Larson and Mildred Constantine’s seminal book “Beyond Craft, The Art Fabric” which had the most impact. In I 975 this opened my eyes to the world of textile art; to a new world. I feasted on the works of Magdalena Abakanowicz from Poland, Olga de Amaral (Colombia), Ed Rossbach (USA) and so many more - people with vision and something to say in their work. I didn’t recognise it at the time, but they gave me a model of possibility.

Visiting the Lausanne Tapestry Biennale in 1981 I saw first hand (and for the first time) monumental works from all over the world; huge, sculptural textiles slicing into large white spaces. (b/w catalogue!) Interesting, occasionally inspiring, often disappointing; I still perceived it as ‘other’. I felt rooted (and somehow bound) by the traditions of woven tapestry. I needed first to find my own voice and to work on a smaller scale – to develop my own critical faculties.

Participating in international tapestry symposia (Melbourne, Australia in 1988 and ‘Distant Lives / Shared Voices’, Lodz, Poland in 1991) opened up dialogues and long-term conversations with artists holding similar passions. As the character of my own work – always rooted in the land – shifted from semi representational to wholly abstract, I sensed increasing shared ground with the more minimal work emanating from Poland and Scandinavia.

Influence

Back in Bradford in the early eighties, I was enthralled to witness Junichi Arai release from a tiny bundle in the palm of his hand, the finest, most iridescent gossamer fabric shimmering and floating across the long table at the front of the lecture hall. It was ethereal, magical and woven with metal. It made my heart sing. In 2001, we were given ‘Textural Space: contemporary Japanese textile art’.  I bathed in the vision, confidence and lightness of touch of these artists. Here I felt a strong affinity with another culture’s sensibilities and it awakened new spark in my own making.

Re- embedded

Throughout my creative life I have been drawn to textiles from times past, re-examining structure and exploring textile language. In the Bankfield Museum, Halifax, The Museum of Mankind (as was) in London and many others, I have poured over tapestry fragments from Peru and Coptic Egypt or raphia cloths from Zaire. These are obviously not of my ethnographic culture, but the more I research, the more I feel part of a rich woven tradition and the more I endeavour to add something of interest to it. I wish for my work to give me, the same frisson that I experience from these humble textiles. In our present technological age, it feels important that the past should inform the present and that the human mark of the individual should be evident.

I no longer feel so obsessive about tapestry per se. In my current collaboration with the V&A, I have surprised myself by seeking out the simplest of plain weave structures from their collections. I find it endlessly fascinating how thread in conjunction with the individual handmark of the weaver, from whatever culture, whatever time period, can have such a bearing on how a cloth looks and holds itself.

UK

Artist Statement	Artist Statement	Artist Statement
Artist Statement	Artist Statement	Artist Statement