TrAIN

Current PhD - The Traces of a Traveller, Textile-Based Narrative

Shu-fang Huang
Hkgkk, 2006
Courtesy and © the artist.

Textiles possess plasticity, changeability and intimacy. Used by artists to represent symbolic or metaphorical meaning, this material has been become a privileged medium for expressing creative ideas. By the abstraction of textile vocabulary, the potential of a textile language, and by implication textile narrative, has been developed. Pamela Johnson for example suggests that ‘cloth is an intimate medium, and a medium of intimate memory’ (1999); and Shuna Rendel proposes that ‘the element of touch connects the relationship between the artist and their materials’ (1997). My own practice-based research is inspired by the tactile language of textile, and its potential to connect with memory and environmental traces.

Like the process of weaving a journey, consistently experiencing the weaving of one’s perception, I understand the creative process as a method of non-linear thinking, through which a metaphorical traveller records her reading of environments. The recording of personal creativity conveys the texture of ones memories. By searching for the clarification for fragmental thoughts, and exploring material meaning, the individual experience of observing one’s inner self and interaction with one’s surroundings can be made visible. The process and method of this practice based research will investigate how the telling of individual stories through textiles could lead to the building up of an autobiographical narrative.

My methodology combines practice with theory, discussing the precedents for the use of textile based narrative in contemporary art since 1960 and exploring the writings of of Chuang Tzu (372-289B.C.) and Edward de Bono (b 1933) and the work of artists including of Bashō (1644-94), Richard Long, and Hamish Fulton.