Cloth and Memory

We are heading South and breaking our journey somewhat. The first stop was at Saltaire, just outside Bradford. I was here a couple of weeks ago and was disappointed that an exhibition I wanted to see had not yet opened. Last week Wendles56 reminded me with her blip that it was now open. So that’s where we went today.

The exhibition is in the roof space of Salts Mill, the Mill that has been converted into an amazing gallery plus visitor centre plus café plus lots of other things. A regular haunt of ours, when we lived close by. The roof space or fourth floor was the original Spinning Room and in its heyday contained 16,380 cap spindles for spinning yarn. Raw alpaca fleece imported from Peru arrived at the top of the building and was processed down through the building to emerge as the finished worsted woollen cloth that Bradford was so famous for. When in full production Salts Mill manufactured over 30,000 yards or 18 miles of cloth per day.

The installation comprises work by 23 international artists, both emerging and established, who have responded to the vast, empty but full of memories, space in many different ways. Some of the work is rather lovely, some makes you think, some . . . well I am still pondering!!

The blip picture shows the work by a Japanese artist. Images of the landscape around the Mill were printed onto Japanese paper and then cut up and woven in traditional methods to provide indistinct images, like fading memory. The installation takes the form of a number of spiral cones each 2 metres high. I liked this, but I also chose it because it gives some idea of the space itself.

A few more pictures are here. The second one gives another view of the whole exhibition space. On the floor is a quilt made of over-dyed and discharge printed handkerchiefs laid on the floor, following the patterns of the flagstones. The next picture is a close up of this. A favourite textile artist of mine, Jeanette Appleton who is well-known for her feltwork, has created works based on original ledgers and sample books from the mill and filled some of the wall cavities used by workers to store bobbins. Wendy has explained the significance of the vintage wooden reels attached to the wall each with its own ‘memory plaque’ label. Down the length of the room is spread a piece of embroidery, recording the heartbeat and footprints of the artist as she ran up and down the room 15 times to represent the amount of fabric produced in one hour at Salts Mill. The final picture is a huge installation of web of dried rice threaded on fine cotton. As I said, some of these take a bit of figuring out!!