Artist Statement

Lace Assemblages is the outcome of a twelve month Master of Research project that considers ancestral lace textiles as metaphors that assemble links between the past, present and future. The project was mobilised by my intrigue for three lace textiles that have been passed down through my maternal and paternal lineages for 110 years.

My role in this project is to draw on the materiality of the laces, reactivating these historical objects through process. Here, materiality considers lace as an open work structure with both visible and invisible signs of wear, the invisible wear accounting for narratives translated into the cloth through touch and experience. Theory and practice have oscillated throughout the project, the findings taking form as wearable garments, neo-tapestries, and a creative process journal.

The exegesis accompanying these works disseminates the textiles and textile processes used, the findings paralleled with scholarly arguments from diverse fields, including textiles, sociology, material culture studies, and practice-led knowledge. This interdisciplinary engagement with lace attempts to define and characterise worn, historic cloth objects as sites for intense speculation on personal histories, tools to extend social and cultural knowledge.

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