Migrations

Curated by Professor Jessica Hemmings
22 October 2016 - 21 January 2017

The portability of textiles – the ease with which they move around the globe – and their hybrid position within the worlds of craft, design and art make them particularly apt carriers of culture.  Alongside this portability is the reality that the textile often exists as a multiple.  While versions roam, others stay closer to home.  Migrations has travelled to America, Ireland, Australia and now England.  Brought together are contemporary artists, designers and an author who all work at the intersection of cultures and use multiple, portable textiles as their vehicle.

Professor Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles.  She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA (Honours) in 1999 and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, earning an MA in 2000.  Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, is published by Kalliope Paperbacks under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (2008).  She has taught at Central Saint Martins, Rhode Island School of Design, Winchester School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art.  In 2010 she edited a collection of essays entitled In the Loop: Knitting Now published by Black Dog, and in 2012 edited The Textile Reader (Berg) and wrote Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury).  Her latest editorial and curatorial project, Cultural Threads, is a book about postcolonial thinking and contemporary textile practice (Bloomsbury: 2015), which is accompanied by the travelling Migrations exhibition.  She is currently Professor of Visual Culture and Head of the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin.

Copies of Cultural Threads will be available to read in the Gallery throughout the exhibition.

As curator of this exhibition, Professor Hemmings will give a talk at the launch event, 2pm Saturday 22nd October.