#67: Tangled - Textile Stories of Care & Connection

So the background to the book.

This book is self-published by me, which means I have done all of the writing and the editing and the negotiating with design and print, and it is available from me only at the moment, which means it's all piled up in boxes in my house.

But it is a wonderful thing to have this book, even though I'm feeling slightly overwhelmed by piles of boxes.

It's a wonderful thing to have it in my hands because this book has been on my mind for so many years.

I first came up with the concept of a book about my practice in 2018.

So in 2018, I had two major projects.

I had an exhibition called Emotional Repair, which I will be referring back to.

And also my Criminal Quilts Project exhibition launched and the book that went with that There was no way I could do a book to go with the Emotional Repair Exhibition as well as doing one for Criminal Quilts at the time, but I wanted to.

Luckily, I revisited my Emotional Repair Exhibition into a new version the following year, in 2019.

That exhibition was called Textile Traces.

and that was what i intended to produce this book for or a small catalogue of the work in the exhibition which was about 30 pieces i thought that would be a really nice way to mark that exhibition and anyway for all sorts of reasons because i had too much going on i didn't get that didn't get that written but the concept was there i wrote a lot of text for emotional repair i wrote magazine articles i wrote stuff for my website i wrote about each object in detail everything i'd made and again for textile traces it was which was a slightly bigger exhibition so there was more work more words and I've always felt that I wanted to share them more because although exhibitions are wonderful, there are always going to be a limited number of people who can get there and can see my textile work in person.

And With all of this writing and some amazing photographs, because I've for many years now commissioned, worked with professional photographers to document my work.

And for all those years, I've got some really interesting images and some great projects that I'm really proud of and other things that I feel haven't been seen enough.

haven't been shared enough because sharing and connecting with other people through my textile making is why I do it I want my work to be to be seen because it connects to other people and it can be meaningful and and beneficial for others to explore and investigate the themes that I'm interested in.

So I wanted to do it for 2019 and I didn't.

Lots of stuff was going on.

By 2020, then suddenly in lockdown, I had a little bit of time.

So I started writing it in lockdown, in the first few months of lockdown and And I made good progress.

I was pulling together things I'd already written, like these exhibition introductions and magazine articles and press releases and all that kind of stuff, and started pulling that together into a kind of chronological catalogue of the work I'd been making over the last...

At that point, it was over the last five years leading up to then, from 2015 to... to 2020.

It's ended up being slightly bigger than that, going earlier and then later.

But I started writing in lockdown in 2020.

But then in June 2020, I was commissioned by Gorefork Textiles Collection to research and write textiles in lockdown, projects I did for them, gathering stories of textile makers in lockdown.

And probably many of you listeners were contributors to that, which is always a wonderful connection to keep going.

So I got distracted again, or I had other things to do.