Re-tracing the archive - materialising memory

• Main Author: Hunt, Carol
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Leeds 2012

The primary interest of the thesis is in textiles and memory, its preservation and its capacity for communication both privately and publicly through cloth. Underpinning this concern is a concept of cloth that can be regarded as archival information; as a carrier of knowledge. Thus, each act of making and telling could bring historical, cultural and personal data into the public arena. Questions centre upon the value of textiles in our lives, on how they become prominent in recollection, and the extent to which textiles can stimulate remembering, not through the strategic mnemonics of national monuments and events, or the mnemonic device of the souvenir, but rather through unlooked for encounters with textiles, in their many and various guises and different sites of context, including the home, the Archive, the museum, the art gallery and virtual spaces. The enquiry focuses on the emergence of particular artworks which place the preservation of memory at their centre. The themes of 'archiving' memory and 'materialising' memory are explored with an analysis of artists' works that use textile media in their visual practice to explore issues relating to individual and collective memory. Examples range from Christian Boltanski and Louise Bourgeois to the less well known contemporary artists Seamus McGuiness, Alison Bartlett, Alicia Felberbaum and Lee Mingwei. The textile arts provide the framework for reflection and critical engagement with cloth.