Tallking With Cloth: a talk by Barbara Burman

This talk is part of the lecture programme accompanying ArtConTex a major textile event taking place at The Minories from 2nd to 5th October 2025.

This illustrated talk considers how cloth embodies and communicates human sentiment and becomes part of our everyday discourse. In its many forms, we experience its unique ‘voice’ at social levels as well as personal and often intimate sensory levels. But this richness, and our fundamental engagement with it, are frequently silenced or overlooked. Using her research on both contemporary domestic stitching, including almost a hundred sewing autobiographies recently contributed to her Our Sewing Stories project, and also drawing on historical examples through letters and diaries, Barbara explores how powerful themes such as memory, love, longing, consolation, distaste and discomfort can arise when people describe their own internal conversation with cloth.