Lost and Found

It's a funny thing - at the beginning of this week I felt a bit lost.  All that intense thinking and writing and editing for my final dissertation - then it is handed in and all I have to do is wait.

Instead I can now focus on my EAST textile art work (above).  I can also prepare for the Being Human Festival 2017 running from 17 to 25 November 2017.  Organised by the School of Advanced Study, University of London I am part of just one of a hundreds of events relative to studies in the humanities.  Talks, workshops, guided walks, exhibitions are held all over the country and this year, internationally too.  The theme for this year is Lost and Found

So on Saturday 18 November you will find me involved in Finding Through Feeling, at the Foundling Museum, London.  There will be a handling session allowing visitors to engage with some replicas of foundling tokens and 18th century infant clothing.  Such activities are held regularly now at the museum - usually the last Saturday of the month.  It is always fascinating being part of the conversations that come out of these events.

Looking through the festival brochure I found some other events that seem to have some textile/craft/token related elements -

Also on Saturday 18 November at the British Museum, the London Metropolitan Archives are running a day of talks, weaving and object handling related to the Somali object display.

On Monday 20 November, Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions are running an event at the Royal College of Nursing looking at the power of objects.  There will be puppetry workshops, emotional talismans and displays of healing objects.

On Thursday 23 November the University of the Arts London are hosting an event at the Museum of London looking at living in the city.  The event looks at how fashion connects people and place and includes a T-shirt design workshop as a way of recognising the importance of community within the city.

Also on Thursday 23 November the Royal College of Art are investigating bereavement and mental health issues through textiles.

Further afield in Newcastle Upon Tyne there is The Great Knitting Workshop: Picking up Dropped Stitches looking at the history of knitting - also on Thursday 23 November.  This is being run by Northumbria University at The Literary and Philosophical Society Library.

The whole festival runs between 17 and 25 November and although there are paper versions of the brochure it is also possible to view on line - beinghumanfestival.org for more information.  Some events have to be booked in advance and the website should have the links.

Growing Colour

Over the last year or so I have become a regular visitor to Cressing Temple Gardens, in Essex (UK) in particular their Walled Garden.  Created to represent a garden from the Tudor era, it includes knots, a medicinal section, a nosegay garden, a potager and a flowery mead.  One of my favourite sections is the dye garden.  

This is the woad plant (isatis tinctoria) as it is currently (June 2015), in the garden at Cressing.  It has a history as a dye plant that goes back to neolithic times, and until the discovery and importation of indigo (indigofera tinctoria) from Asia was the only way of dyeing cloth blue in England for thousands of years.  For many centuries it was also needed for dyeing green - cloth was first dyed blue and then over-dyed with yellow.  It is one of the reasons that early textiles such as tapestries, change so much with age - the yellow dye is not so fast and as it fades, anything that was once green reverts to blue.

By the 16th century, most blue cloth was dyed with imported indigo.  Woad, although still home grown, was used mainly for the fermenting process needed to create a usable dye (see John Edmonds book The History of Woad and the Medieval Woad Vat.)

One of my special interests is the tokens of the 18th century foundling hospital - notes and objects left with infants brought to the hospital, many of which were fabric.  A large number of the pieces of fabric were taken from the children's clothing and many cottons and linens are blue and white stripes and checks.  These simple, rather plain snippets of fabric are not at first sight, the most interesting of the fabrics, but when you realise how many people and hours of work were needed for the creation of every piece of cloth it is a reminder that their use as tokens is only one small part of their story. Not only for the process of dyeing, but time and manpower was also needed for spinning and weaving, which until industrialisation would have been done on home based looms.  Then there was the peril of the sailors who brought indigo from Asia to dye the threads blue, and of course there is the manufacture of the cotton which depended on the despicable slave trade.

So when I looked at this unassuming plant all this came to my mind, and it was just one plant in a whole garden on historical (sometimes textile related) stories.  The garden has a whole host of other dye plants and the garden is free to visit all year around.  The Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square, London is the place to visit to find out more about the tokens.