Workshop Series: The Archive in Hand

About the series:

The Archive in Hand is a collaborative workshop series and publishing project curated by Michaela Clarence and AYFP, exploring the role of textiles in recording, shaping and transmitting knowledge.

Over four sessions held at the Goldsmiths Textile Collection, we’ll be engaging with archival objects through hands-on, participatory workshops that centre material ways of knowing and learning. Open to students, designers and anyone with a general interest in textiles or design, the sessions invite direct engagement with selected textile objects to spark dialogue, reflection and creative response. The insights and work generated through these workshops will inform a future publication outcome, published via AYFP.

All making supplies are included in ticket cost. Workshops are in-person only and wheelchair accessible. Open to attendees of ages 16+. Spaces limited to 10 attendees per workshop.

About the archive:

The Goldsmiths Textile Collection was founded by textile artist Constance Howard as a hands-on teaching tool, built for making, learning and creative inquiry. Today, it holds over 4,000 objects from across the globe, spanning the 18th century to the present, and remains an important, publicly accessible resource for research, practice and material exploration.

Thursday 19th June, 1-3:30pm

Castles Made of Cloth: Memory, Space and the Archive with Sky Dair

Join artist and poet Sky Dair for a quiet, reflective writing workshop rooted in textiles, memory and place. Inspired by her poetry collection It Takes Time to Build Castles (Worms Publishing), Sky invites participants to work with tactile prompts and objects from the Goldsmiths Textile Collection to create personal writing grounded in sensory observation and emotional response.

We’ll begin with meditative exercises and warm-up writing before creating our own handmade notebooks using reproduced archival material and texts. Through a series of guided prompts, we’ll explore the way textures, domestic fabrics and everyday objects hold emotional charge and how we can transform them into written language.

Sky Dair (she/her) is a London-based writer and multidisciplinary artist exploring emotional release through video, sound and self-publishing. The intersections of the arts and how to build links between different works are of great importance to her, she finds enjoyment in bringing new audiences to pieces they may feel are not for them - both formally through education work and informally with friends and via social media. Her debut poetry collection It Takes Time to Build Castles was published this year by Worms Publishing. She’s an alum of Central Saint Martins and School of the Damned.

Thursday 26th June, 1-3:30pm

Worn Objects: Past, Present and Future with Morag Seaton

Led by designer and researcher Morag Seaton, this workshop explores the biographies of worn objects through storytelling, drawing and speculative writing. Drawing on her ongoing Worn Archive project, Morag invites participants to engage with clothing and textile items from the Goldsmiths Textiles Collection as living witnesses to memory, identity, and change.

Using fast-paced drawing exercises and guided writing prompts, we’ll explore the past, present and future of these objects, asking: what have they seen, who wore them, and what might they become? Participants will generate short fictional or poetic responses, building a collective portrait of cloth as a communicator of human experience.

Morag Seaton (she/her) is a designer and writer working between fashion, research, and education. She’s co-founder of Worn and runs her own studio creating objects inspired by people’s clothing stories. Morag is her name and the name of her design studio where she makes pockets, bags and other fashion artefacts. Each carefully constructed object is inspired by conversations with people about their clothing experiences, understandings and fictional ideas. Each project starts with an everyday or speculative question that seeks to unpack the socio-cultural, environmental and personal significance of the objects we wear. She is a graduate of Glasgow School of Art and Royal College of Art.

Thursday 10th July, 1-3:30pm

Stitch Samplers: Sites of Fragments, Threads and Personal Archaeologies with Emily Fielding

Join artist and writer Emily Fielding for a hands-on workshop exploring how textiles can act as carriers of memory, language and identity. Drawing inspiration from historical stitch samplers in the Goldsmiths Textile Collection, we will create layered textile collages that reflect personal and collective narratives.

Samplers, often overlooked as unfinished, fragmentary works, were historically used as teaching tools and repositories of knowledge. In this workshop, we will use them as conceptual springboards to experiment with image, text and stitch. Participants will create their own fabric-based "pages" to map stories, memories and material languages.

Emily Fielding (she/her) is an artist and writer based between Paris and London. Her work explores memory, re-enactment, and archaeological landscapes through performance and practice-led research.Through a research-as-practice approach, she questions the ways we construct and interpret the past. Ideas of past and present, historical and personal, are intertwined and overlaid in order to delve into the archaeological imagination. She holds an MPhil in Heritage Studies from Cambridge and a BA in Fine Art from Wimbledon.

Thursday 17th July, 1-3:30pm

The Fabric Speaks: Collective Speculating and Oral Histories with Lu Rose Cunningham

Join us for a generative writing and storytelling workshop led by writer and curator Lu Rose Cunningham, exploring the poetic potential of textile objects held in the Goldsmiths Textile Collection. Through close looking, haptic engagement and speculative writing, we’ll delve into the untold histories and imagined lives of dress fragments, cuffs, collars and other soft artefacts.

This workshop invites participants to work individually and in pairs, writing in response to selected textile objects, and experimenting with sound, storytelling and performance. Together, we will explore how cloth can speak - through texture, form and absence and how writing might offer new ways of listening.

Lu Rose Cunningham (she/her/they/them) is a writer and curator fascinated by wetlands and winged things. She has published poetry with Broken Sleep Books and shown work at South London Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, and more. She co-founded The Writers’ Room, providing support for practitioners working at the intersection of image and text.

About the curators:

Michaela Clarence is a design historian and writer based in London. Her work explores the haptic and emotional afterlives of dress, tracing how clothing is remembered, misremembered and reanimated through bodies, archives and glass. She is a Postgraduate Researcher at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art, supported by multiple scholarships, her dissertation examines the aesthetic and social implications of ribbon use in eighteenth-century England.

Michaela’s practice moves between material research and critical writing, between performance, textiles and theory. She has published with Harper’s Bazaar (US) and Simulacrum Magazine, and is a frequent speaker on the intersections of dress, memory and representation.

AYFP (A Yarn & Fibre Publication) is a DIY magazine and small press publishing research- and practice-led content about textiles and craft. Founded in 2022 by Emma Crabtree, AYFP has so far released two issues, as well as a growing portfolio of artists publications. AYFP also organises community events in South East London, such as yarn swaps and workshops.

Workshop Photography & Publication:

As part of this workshop, we’ll be documenting the event through photography and collecting some of the work created by participants. Selected images and creative responses may be included in The Archive in Hand publication.

To make this possible, we kindly ask all participants to sign a short Creative Release Form on arrival. This gives us permission to include your work and any photographs taken during the session in the final publication and any related communications. The form will be sent prior to the day of the workshop and signed by attendees on the day.

If you would like your work to be included in the publication, we will collect it for documentation and return it to you at a later date.

If you do not wish to sign the form you can still partake in the workshops, but your work and images will not be included in the publication. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to get in touch with us in advance - we’re happy to chat things through.