The Reflective Stitch-In is part of MAI-DAY: Textile Elements, the 1st event under the Chelsea, Camberwell, Wimbledon Design School initiative, Making-Design-Agency (MAI-DAY), part of the Design School’s Conference Series and part of UAL Research Season 2022

A prime consideration for MAI-DAY is to create a space for discussion: a space where practitioners can collectively explore connections and disconnections, that in turn could inform new thinking-through-making directions.

The Reflective Stich-In is the final event in the Textile Elements conversation series which brings together pairs of practitioners from different aspects of stitch-making and related craft-art practice to share thoughts about 3 fundamental aspects of stitch practice.

Textile Elements is hosted by Professor Carol Tulloch, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL and Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd, Nottingham Trent University.

The event Reflective Stitch-In with Sequoia Barnes, Melanie Bowles, Elaine Igoe, Selvedge editor Polly Leonard and Claire-Wellesley-Smith; stitching facilitated by Stitch-School takes place 30 March, 2-4pm, in the Banqueting Hall at Chelsea College of Arts.

This face-to-face event will provide space to consider the interconnections between the preceding 3 conversations within an atmosphere of thinking-while-stitching.

If you'd like to attend the preceding 3 conversations which take place online on consecutive Wednesdays in March, please book online.

Bios:

Dr. Sequoia Barnes is a textile/mixed media artist and design scholar whose work centres around making processes, rituals, and modes of fashioning. She deploys research through praxis often in her explorations of black diasporic symbolisms, storytelling as performance, positioning the creative process as a performance/ritual. Her scholarly work currently explores the fashion designer, Patrick Kelly. Recent artistic practice includes responses to Senga Nengudi (Fruitmarket Gallery) and Nick Cave (Tramway) with the performative works ‘Sew Me A Quilt. Tell You A Story.’ (2019), ‘The Burden I Bear Is Heavy’ (2019), respectively, and ‘Gateway’ (2021) commissioned by the Edinburgh Art Festival.

Melanie Bowles is Senior Lecturer BA Textile design at Chelsea College of Arts. She is author of ‘Digital Textile Design’ and ‘Print, Make, Wear'. Bowles founded and established ‘Stitch-School’ in 2018 to provide inspirational and technical guidance to reconnect to the benefits of embroidery through embroidery kits, workshops and large-scale embroidery events around ‘Stitch-School’s’ communal embroidery table. Projects and collaborations include Alexander McQueen, Marie Curie, V&A Dundee, Trimarchi (Argentina), Dulwich Picture Gallery, Brixton Tate Library (Mayor of London) and The Barbican Center. Stitch-School recently provided bespoke embroidery kits for The Hayward Gallery exhibition, ‘The Woven Child - Louise Bourgeois’. www.stitch-school.com

Dr Elaine Igoe is Senior Lecturer in Textile Design at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL and has taught across undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral level at the University of Portsmouth and the Royal College of Art. Elaine has made key contributions to the critical theory of textile design in her scholarship and editorial capacities; applying an approach that interrogates the discipline of textiles from within while simultaneously addressing theoretical discourses and wider contexts. In 2021 she published ‘Textile Design Theory in the Making’ with Bloomsbury, a monograph including contributions from international design scholars.

Polly Leonard is the Founder of Selvedge, a magazine about the culture of cloth. Launched in 2004 to celebrate our cerebral and sensual addiction to cloth, the magazine revolutionized the way textiles are presented and became the world’s leading publication in its field and now has a dedicated international following of over seventy-five thousand. As a continuation of the conversations that start in the pages of the magazine, Selvedge produces a podcast, newsletter, blog and inspirational Instagram feed - featuring artisans, adventures and opinions. These avenues are a meeting point for the community and an entry point into the world of textiles for those looking for an original and broadening perspective. Selvedge fairs. tours and educational experiences extend the opportunities to share knowledge and develop skills. Polly has specialist knowledge and has lectured internationally on all aspects of textiles. Her own practice encompasses; weaving, embroidery and basket making.

Claire Wellesley-Smith is an artist, writer and researcher based in Bradford. Her practice includes long-term community-based projects and residencies that use textile making to explore textile heritage. Her soon to be submitted AHRC funded PhD at The Open University is multi-site ethnographic research into community resilience through engagement with textile heritage and craft and is based in post-industrial textile areas in West Yorkshire and East Lancashire. Her most recent book ‘Resilient Stitch: Wellbeing and Connection in Textile Art’ was published by Batsford in 2021. She teaches and lectures internationally.

Carol Tulloch is a writer, curator and Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism at the University of the Arts London based at Chelsea College of Arts, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her research focuses on concerns about difference, being, belonging, the making of the self and things, explored in The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (2016), and recently includes ‘Epiphanies of Dress’ in Lubaina Himid (2021), ‘Long Time Gyal Me Never See You’ in Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test (2021), Jessica Ogden: Still (2017). http://professorcaroltulloch.com/

Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd is Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham School of Art & Design, part of Nottingham Trent University. She has explored the emerging field of fashion and sustainability since 2004. Amy is currently undertaking a Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. Her Fellowship project, Fashion Fictions, brings people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems. Other initiatives include Reknit Revolution; Crafting the Commons; and the Stitching Together network, which explores participatory textile making in research and practice.