Text/Textile is a one-day symposium taking place at the National College of Art and Design on October 25th 2024. We invite you to join us in thinking and making in response to the question “what happens when text production meets textile(s) production, and the etymology has to confront itself?” (Both ‘text’ and ‘textile’ come from the verb ‘to weave’ in Latin.) We take this common word-origin as a point of departure to explore themes of time, dailiness and in/visible labour alongside the role and place of literary and artistic process amidst situations of societal and environmental crisis.
Text/Textile will include talks from visual artists and writers whose practices incorporate both text and textiles; material workshops led by contemporary practitioners; a walking tour exploring the material heritage of Dublin’s Liberties via place names and local lore; and an exhibition of textile and text-based work at The Micro Gallery at the NCAD Library.
Contributors include: Sara Baume, Anne Boyer, Chloe Brenan, Áine Byrne, Tuqa Al Sarraj, Rachel Fallon, Anthony Freeman O’Brien, Cliona Harmey, Éireann Lorsung and The Liberties Weavers. More to be announced.
Text/Textile is co-convened by artist-educators:
Chloe Brenan
Cliona Harmey
Éireann Lorsung
This project has been supported with Public Engagement Funds from the Creative Futures Academy (CFA) – a groundbreaking partnership between three leading creative institutions – the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), University College Dublin (UCD), and the Institute of Art Design + Technology (IADT).
The event is co-funded by the NCAD Research Office.
Flyer image credit: India Johnson, self-describing texts, Approx. 12″ square
typewriter on cotton muslin
2023
Schedule:
9:30 Welcome, Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre (HCLT)
9:40 Helen McAllister, opening talk, HCLT
10:00 Guided/Self-guided tours, meet in NCAD Courtyard
Tours:
In Our Shoes walking tour of The Liberties with Anthony Freeman O’Brien (Robert Emmet CDP); Distillers Press with Jamie Murphy; NIVAL with Ruth Hallinan; The Micro Gallery at The Edward Murphy Library, NCAD with Leah Hilliard and Lena Willryd.
11:15 Refreshments, Foyer of Harry Clarke Hall
11:30 Keynote: Sara Baume talk, HCLT
Flags, sails, handkerchiefs and the blank page: An illustrated talk charting two decades of textile work, from the kinetic sculptures the artist made out of her old clothes in art school to the smaller, devotional pieces and gifts she has made on her sofa in recent years, as well as the cultural artefacts, domestic objects and personal events that have influenced them and the way in which they have variously informed – and been informed by – her writing practice.
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Workshops (locations vary; see program)
Workshop Artists: Rachel Fallon, Tuqa Al Sarraj, Sarah Moss, Áine Byrne, The Liberties Weavers, Chloe Brenan, Éireann Lorsung
15:30 Refreshments, Foyer of Harry Clarke Hall
17:30 Dinner break
19:30 Anne Boyer talk, HCLT
Thread and Calamity: This will be a talk about everyday art in the face of everyday calamity. How does resistance find its forms, and how can these forms create collective life? We will think about two quiet arts – poetry and needlecraft – in the context of industrial capitalist modernity, and look toward the intimate histories of handwork against the landscape of machines.
Chloe Brenan is a visual artist working primarily with film, photography, language and publication format. She creates careful examinations of the poetic haptics of daily life, paying close attention to subjects and processes on the edge of perception that call into question boundaries between bodies, environments and wider structures of power. Her work is informed by feminist and new materialist epistemologies. She teaches in the Department of Sculpture and Expanded Practice at NCAD.
Éireann Lorsung is the author of The Century, winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award, as well as two previous collections of poems: Her book and Music for Landing Planes By, which was named a New and Noteworthy collection by Poets & Writers. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a minor in Studio Art from the University of Minnesota, a PhD in Critical Theory from the University of Nottingham, and a Certificate in Art & Ecology from NCAD. She teaches in the Mary Lavin Centre for Creative Writing in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin.
Cliona Harmey teaches in the NCAD Media Dept and works primarily with technology, subtly exploring the politics inherent in both contemporary and historical socio-technical systems. She uses material exploration and hands-on artistic practice to explore their materiality and logics. She has worked with text at a variety of scales from large scale public art works (Dublin Ships) to automated and ephemeral system based works/publications for gallery and other contexts.
