Featured image: Fiona Johnston – Mending a Broken Heart
Our Members’ Project for 2023/24 focused on how textile artists can embrace the idea of enhancing and decorating textiles as we repair and/or restore them.
What we repair and how may now be far removed from the days of the turning collars and darning socks, but we are nonetheless keen to reuse and recycle. Traditional patchwork quilts have evolved into memory quilts with photos, letters and other ephemera; boro has moved beyond simply patching; and darning has gained a new life as a surface decoration. Water soluble ‘fabrics’ and the embellisher now enables textile artists to create completely new fabrics. Machine work is done over holes and tears and the garment takes on a whole new life.
Members were invited to consider a series of questions – What calls out to you to be repaired? What of the need for mental or physical repair? What of recreate? Do you enjoy the challenge and ultimate pleasure of taking fabrics, threads and other media and combining them into something new, or extending the life of an old textile?
Their answers inspired their interpretation of ‘Repair, Restore and Recreate‘.
