Audio recordings of on 30 April. Althea McNish in conversation with John Weiss

John Weiss and Althea McNish, Stuart Hall Library

We are very grateful to Althea and John for an insightful and interesting evening at the April Clothes Cloth and Culture Group. Althea is an internationally successful textile designer who came to Britain from Trinidad and Tobago in the 1950s. She studied as an architect, at the London College of Printing and at the Royal College of Art. Althea's vibrant textile designs were sold by Liberty's, Hull Traders and other textile companies throughout Europe.

Fabric by Althea McNish

Althea's husband, John Weiss, is an architect and jewellery designer. John and Althea talked entertainingly about their lives together and the inspiration sources for Althea's textile designs. They touched topics as diverse as the origins of their surnames, the royal family, Althea's experience as a migrant to Britain and how she worked with technicians in the textile industry. Read more 

some of the audience and a sample of Althea's fabric

Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group. Dr. Althea McNish in conversation with John Weiss.

Join us for this free talk Thursday 30 April 2015 6:30 - 8:30 pm at Stuart Hall Library

Dr. Althea McNish is a painter and textile designer, she came to Britain from Trinidad and Tobago in the 1950s to study at the London College of Printing and the Royal College of Art.

Best known for her innovative and successful textile and surface pattern designs, Althea worked with Liberty & Co., Hull Traders and international companies. Examples of the range of fabrics designed by Althea can be seen on her website

Althea and was associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement. Her art work draws on diverse cultural influences.

In 2011 Althea was featured in the exhibition RCA Black organised by The Royal College of Art in collaboration with the African and African Caribbean Design Diaspora (AACDD). The exhibition celebrated art and design by African and African-Caribbean graduates and students; a group who are often marginalised within the creative industries.

Althea describes her experiences as an artist and designer in her interview with John Weiss in Building Britannia: Life Experience With Britain, 2009. She talks about how she worked with the major international textile companies, her use of colour and 'tropicalisation' of English flowers.

"In the context of the unacknowledged contribution and influence of the Black artist, Althea McNish had a visible effect on British textiles and thus on, and in, British culture" John Weiss 1998

Dr. McNish works in partnership with her husband, designer John Weiss, who will interview her for this Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group event

Talk: researching a parasol from Goldsmiths Textile Collection

Christine Checinska and Ruby Hoette's recent talk at Goldsmiths is now available online.

It is part of Goldsmiths Objects (In)Sight project which "aims to develop object-based research skills and foster cross-disciplinary thinking".

Christine and Rubys' session focused on a parasol from the Goldsmiths Textile Collection. Their talk is part of a series delivered by academics or practitioners from different disciplines. In each session the speakers chose an object from Goldsmiths Special Collections & Archives, or Textile Collection and shared their ideas on research methods into the artefact.

Christine Checinska is the 2nd Stuart Hall Library Animateur and founder of our Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group.

Talking about The Troubles,Textiles and Northern Ireland

The March 26 2015 Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group meeting here at Stuart Hall Library proved so interesting to our audience that we had trouble persuading them to leave on time. If you missed the event, audio recordings of the talks are available to stream: see below.

Dr Karen Nickell talked about her doctoral research 'Embroidery in the Expanded Field: Textile
Narratives in Irish Art Post-1968’ with a response from Professor Catherine Harper.

Karen talked about how textiles are embedded in Irish social, cultural and political life. Her research examines textile practices by individual artists and communities in response to the conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. Read more about the research and presenters.

The evening started on an informal note; following the group's custom, the presenters showed the audience textile artefacts as 'conversationals'. Karen and Catherine brought with them carefully chosen textile pieces invested with both personal meaning and with cultural significance.

Hand-knitted dishcloth: conversational
 brought by Catherine Harper

Irish crochet: conversational
brought by Karen Nickell

Yinka Shonibare and the William Morris Family Album

William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow

Exhibition review by Dr Christine Checinska

Yinka Shonibare MBE, 'The William Morris Family Album', 2015, Copyright the artist, Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, Commissioned by William Morris Gallery

Yinka Shonibare has recently said about his work …

I am very interested in identity, in history and understanding why things are the way that they are today, and there is always a reason for that… For example how do you begin to understand multicultural Britain now, what brought that about, why all these people are here – what is the history of that? That is the history of colonialism. There is no getting away from the past, unfortunately, because the past is always present.[1]

This notion of the past being ever present – cutting into, interrupting and informing the everyday – is explored further in the current William Morris Gallery (WMG) exhibition: the William Morris Family Album. This show is in fact the gallery’s first major commission. Shonibare characteristically examines the legacy of Empire and the global textile trade by restaging photographs from the Morris family album using local Walthamstow residents as his sitters. In this context Shonibare’s use of Dutch wax cotton takes on intriguing new meanings.

The Dutch wax print cloth that features in much of Shonibare’s work is a metaphor for the interrelationship between Britain and Africa and voices the complexity of black British identity. As with much of Shonibare’s work, there is something very seductive about these works. The heady use of colour and pattern and the sensual use of texture are almost hypnotic. The viewer is immediately drawn into Shonibare’s make believe world, but it is only then, on closer inspection of each, that his sophisticated use of semiotics and layers of suggested meaning gradually becomes more apparent. The mixture of and tension between an aesthetic quality that is pleasurable and seductive to the eye, and the layer upon layer of hidden meaning is arresting. Entering into his world, the viewer is forced to inhabit the space between repulsion and desire that is the colonial gaze; the work troubles the “colonised mind” and in so doing, Shonibare’s central themes and questions come artfully into play. I am deliberately inserting the term “artfully”, since, for me, there is always a level of wit and mischief making in Shonibare’s work. There is an aura of irony and satire, together with the obvious mastery of his art. At first reading these works seem playful and harmless, but then, when read more closely carries troubling messages and uneasy questions.

Shonibare’s use of metaphors of African textiles against metaphors of quintessential Englishness, i.e. the Victorian family album with its references to home, to the Victorian parlour with its associations of Empire, the Victorian era itself often viewed through nostalgic eyes as a time when Britain was truly “great”, gives rise to a characteristic level of complexity. The Victorian era was also the era of the anthropological ethnographic museum, e.g. Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum opened in 1883, adding a further layer of questions and possible meanings; Shonibare takes the idea of the “cabinet of curiosities”, stretching and subverting it, reversing it, almost as if to suggest that anthropology itself is about invention rather than discovery – he questions the “writing” of one culture by another. The recurring themes of the fusion of the diametrically opposed, questions of authenticity and perception, identity and difference/self and other, Empire and the resulting interconnecting histories are all alive in this new work. Yet read against what we know of William Morris’ socialist politics, new questions about equality today arise; class, culture and race collide. Equally when we consider the current gentrification of Walthamstow in London, it’s morphing into trendy ‘Awesomestow’, additional questions around these issues come to the fore. But what is also of interest to me is the way in which the politics of Morris and Shonibare at times overlap:

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make. William Morris

Similarly, Shonibare himself in an in-conversation at the WMG spoke of his respect for Morris’ politics. He also made reference to their mutual love of the decorative.

The use of so-called African textiles is the lynchpin of Shonibare’s sophisticated use of signs and symbols … but these textiles, these brightly coloured easy to spot cloths are not African at all and even if they were how could they possibly represent an entire continent? These vibrant prints are often referred to as Dutch wax cottons or Dutch wax-resist prints. As Jessica Hemmings writes:

The transnational identity of wax-resist textiles emerges from the numerous cultures that have in the past, and continue today, to identify with wax-resist…During Dutch colonization of [Indonesia] batik production was taken up in the Netherlands … but the market proved unsuccessful… Instead the textiles found a welcome reception in West Africa, becoming symbols of national pride associated with independence gained by a number of nations in the late 1950s and 1960s.[2]

Rooted in meticulous historical research, Shonibare’s ‘principled clash of colour and pattern’, rather than celebrating identities framed by cultural and racial difference, celebrates hybrid cultural identities that are continually in flux. He uses familiar signifiers of African-ness and Englishness, subverting them in order to deconstruct our understanding and acceptance of them. The Dutch wax print cloth is a metaphor for the interrelationship between Britain and Africa: the complexity of so-called black British identity. In this instance Shonibare’s choice of colour on the prints is reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelite colour palette; a subtle reference to a certain notions of Englishness.

Shonibare’s William Morris Family Album, though difficult to summarize in a few words, highlights questions about authenticity and purity, whilst the rending of metaphorical borders between the self and the other/us and them/colonizer and colonized, through the use of “African” cloth, and a post-structuralist concern with the polysemic nature of non-verbal signs, through playing havoc and making mischief with seemingly recognisable visual codes.

Copyright Dr Christine Checinska 9/3/15

[1] Shonibare, Museums Journal, June 2013, p. 41.

[2] Hemmings, Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury Publications)

Black identity and the Role of Contemporary Art: lecture by Dr.Christine Checinska

Dr.Christine Checinska, Stuart Hall Library animateur, fashion designer,curator and academic will deliver a lecture at the Dulwich Art Gallery on Wednesday 18th February 10.30-11.30 am.

Her talk should appeal to anyone interested in art and textiles, and is part of the series: Staying Power: Art and the Black Experience.

Christine's lecture will look at the use of cloth in the work of artists: Yinka Shonibare, Maude Sulter and Barbara Walker as a way of examining three moments within the history of the ‘black’ presence in Britain, focussing primarily on issues around African Diasporas, cultural identities and histories.

More details on the Dulwich Picture Gallery webpage

'Cultural Threads' listen to the panel discussion at the Clothes Cloth & Culture Group

Jasleen Kaur

Dr. Jessica Hemmings, editor of
'Cultural Threads: transnational textiles today'

The November 2014 Clothes Cloth & Culture Group meeting was a panel discussion to mark the publication of  'Cultural Threads: transnational textiles today'. The panel consisted of the editor Dr. Jessica Hemmings, contributors to the book and the featured artists and designers : Dr. Christine Checinska, Sarah Rhodes and Jasleen Kaur. Curator Dr. Jenny Doussan responded to the publication as an external voice.

Audio recordings of the of event are available to stream at the bottom of the page.

Cultural Threads considers contemporary artists and designers who work at the intersection of cultures and use textiles as their vehicle. Ideas about belonging to multiple cultures, which can result in a sense of connection to everywhere and nowhere, are more pertinent to society today than ever. So too are the layers of history - often overlooked - behind the objects that make up our material world.

The publication closely mirrors many of the aims and interests of the Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group. For example, in seeking to demystify postcolonial theory and show how it is embodied and articulated through textiles. The emphasis on textiles as a record of lived experience also recalls the ‘conversationals' or items of clothing or cloth that our presenters have used to introduce themselves and which exemplify their interest in and human connection to the subject.

Sarah Rhodes

Dr Jenny Doussan  & Dr Christine Checinska

Listen to Clothes Cloth & Culture talks by Sue Jones & Michael McMillan

If you missed the event 'Saga Bwoys and Bedouin Women’on 25 September; audio recordings of the speakers are available at the bottom of this post. The photographs are of the 'conversational artefacts' chosen by the speakers. The cardigan and embroidery are now on display in the library with accompanying texts by Sue and Michael.

Michael McMillan - Garbicci cardigan or ‘yardie cardie' 

Sue Jones - embroidery by her mother

Podcasts from 'The Subversive Stitch Revisited: the Politics of Cloth'

Hey Paul Studios, Uterus Embroidery (CC BY 2.0)

Members of our Clothes Cloth and Culture Group will be excited to see that Goldsmiths have made available audio recordings of the speakers at The Subversive Stitch Revisited: the Politics of Cloth event as podcasts on their website.

Amongst the other recordings, you will be able to listen to the presentation by Dr. Christine Checinska, the Second Stuart Hall Library Animateur. Christine was a speaker at the Goldsmiths event which was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in November 2013. Her presentation was entitled Second Skins: cloth, difference and the art of transformation. Both Christine and Iniva contributed to the planning of the event.

The event was dedicated to the memory of  Rozsika Parker, the author of  The Subversive Stitch: embroidery and the making of the feminine (1984). The keynote speaker was Professor  Griselda Pollock, who collaborated work with Parker during the 1980s to produce key feminist art texts.

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Reporting on 'Bedouin Women and Saga Bwoys' at the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group 25th September 2014

Dr. Michael McMillan talks about his Gabicci cardigan and 'yardie' style

The Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group autumn programme got off to an inspiring start last night with presentations from Michael McMillan and Sue Jones, delivered in a conversational style that has become characteristic of our monthly textiles hub.

The evening was particularly thrilling at a personal level since parallels could be drawn between the inspiration points for my own body of research – my father’s elegance provided a catalyst for my doctoral research into the creolised aesthetic of the Empire Windrush generation and the impact of the African-Caribbean presence on English male dress; my mother’s stitching provided the creative spark for my current concern with ‘crafting difference’ and the way in which history might somehow be worked by hand, concerns which underpin the ethos of the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group itself.

At first glance McMillan and Jones’ papers may seem somewhat unrelated. As you will hear from the podcast, through sharing ideas about cloth and memories marked by the wearing of particular clothes, the connections between the two became clearer as the evening progressed. Both spoke of the way in which clothes and cloth allow those without a voice to speak about themselves and the way in which they would like to be seen. Both spoke about cultural entanglements - for McMillan across the islands and across the Atlantic, for Jones across Jordan and England. They pinpointed cross-generational exchanges. They discussed the idea of repeating stories of rebellion and the role that the ritual of dressing plays in the struggle to be seen.

Dr. Sue Jones talking about her mother's embroidery

The richness of McMillan and Jones’ presentations reminded us of centrality of clothes and cloth to the human experience. Jones’ conversation piece, a linen tablecloth embroidered by her mother, demonstrated to us the way in which cloth becomes saturated with cultural meaning as craft techniques and family keepsakes are passed from one generation to the next. This is what motivates each of us to engage in this ongoing conversation with everyday stuff.

© Christine Checinska 26th September 2014

Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group. 25 September 2014 'Saga Bwoys and Bedouin Women’

Bani Hamida Weaving Project, Makawir Centre, Jordan. Photo: Sue Jones

Three Jamaican immigrants (left to right) John Hazel, a 21-year-old boxer, Harold Wilmot, 32, and John Richards, a 22-year-old carpenter, arriving at Tilbury on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush', smartly dressed in zoot suits and trilby hats. Photo: Douglas Miller/Getty Images

Join us on Thursday 25th September 2014 at 6:30pm - 8.30pm to hear presentations by Dr Michael McMillan and Dr Sue Jones followed by an informal question and answer session. The meeting will be convened by Dr Christine Checinska, the 2nd Stuart Hall Library Animateur.

  

What the Bedouin women taught me - re-connecting with my mother's craft skills - Dr Sue Jones

I went in the opposite direction of my mother's life as a housewife and home-working seamstress - non-domestic, professional, university educated, without children and travelling around the world doing consultancies.
But my work always related to my background - concerned with poverty, income generation and women's lives and empowerment. I made a particular connection with a Bedouin women's weaving project in Jordan.
It is only by reflecting on this very long term relationship with the older Bedouin weavers and their daughters - that I can see how they helped me re-focus on my mother and her craft skills.
It leaves me with current questions to share here - about women's involvement in craft work now and how far their work can be seen and acknowledged as creative or is it just a source of income? What was it like for my mother?

Dr Sue Jones: As an anthropologist and professional urban planner, Dr Sue Jones has been involved, since the 1980s, in consultancies, lectures and writing textbooks about poverty and community projects around the world, including Africa and the Caribbean.

In 2006, she completed a 20 year longitudinal PhD thesis of Bedouin women and their weaving project in Jordan. Since 2009 she has been a Visiting Research fellow at Goldsmiths, focused on Material Culture in the contemporary context. This has included: (2011) an exhibition about the weaving project, (2013) a special Issue of the journal Textile -Materialising voices from the Middle East and (2014) a film with the Bani Hamida women. She is currently researching textile case studies around the world.

‘Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys': Migration, Grooming and Dandyism - Dr Michael McMillan

I have been always struck by how men of my father's generation were so well dressed in those iconic black and white documentary photographs depicting their arrival after a three-week transatlantic journey by sea. Their neatly pressed suited with and a white breast pocket handkerchief, polished brogue shoes, white starched shirt with throat straggling tie and a trilby hat cocked at an angle. In Eastern Caribbean vernacular, they were ‘Saga Bwoys' or ‘Sweet Bwoys', a masculine persona who in my rite of passage from being short pants ‘coloured' boy to a black British young man I saw as an exemplar of ‘good grooming' in his sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off his tongue like Lord Kitchener's Calypso. These ‘Lonely Londoners' would later become Jamaican ‘Rude Bwoys' swaggering as if to a Ska or Reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits with the attitude and creole chat of the best dressed chicken on the street. In my camel Crombie coat, suede trimmed Garbicci cardigan or ‘yardie cardie', pleated Farah slacks, Bally shoes with shiny buckle stepping out like a ‘Rude Bwoy' in a ‘Causal Style' to ‘rave' at a Sound System dance. ‘Saga Bwoys' and ‘Rude Bwoys' are constituents of the contemporary ‘Raggamuffin' geneology that as subcultural black masculine practices have been self-fashioned in the rhizoid network of racial, transcultural and diaspora exchange and transfer.
Yet there has been a limited focus on how and what postwar Caribbean migrant men contributed through the material culture and performativity of the ‘Saga Bwoy' and ‘Rude Bwoy' to a diasporic understanding of black dandyism. Using Carol Tulloch's ‘style-fashion-dress' amongst other conceptual framework: this presentation will begin to explore the ontology and materiality of a process that saw the aesthetic embodiment and reconstruction of diasporic ‘Caribbeanness' in a British context of the dressed black male body; a body that would come to reconfigure the streets of urban Britain with fresh dynamic masculinities in motion.

Dr. Michael McMillan is a writer, dramatist, artist/curator and scholar of Vincentian migrant parentage whose recent play includes: a new translation of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan (Trenchtown) (MAT tour 2010 & 2012) and curatorial work includes: My Hair: Black Hair Culture, Style & Politics (Origins of the Afro Comb, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology 2013), I Miss My Mum's Cooking (Who More Sci-Fi Than Us, KAdE Kunsthal, Amersfoort, Netherlands 2012), The Waiting Room (Stories & Journeys, Gwynedd Museum & Art Gallery, Bangor, North Wales 2012), The Beauty Shop (198 Contemporary Arts & Learning 2008), The West Indian Front Room (Geffrye Museum 2005-06), The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home (Black Dog Publishing 2009) www.thefrontroom.org.uk/ He has an Arts Doctorate from Middlesex Univ. 2010 and is currently an Associate Lecturer in Cultural & Historical Studies as well as Associate Researcher RAS project at London CSM/Wimbledon CSM, UAL.

Clothes Cloth and Culture Group first meeting

Thursday 29th May is the first meeting of new Clothes Cloth and Culture Group at the Stuart Hall Library. The event was fully-booked within the first couple of days, so there is obviously a great deal of interest in this area of research and art practice.

The Group is a monthly forum for creative practitioners and thinkers working with cloth. Each month two presenters will talk about their research. There will be an opportunity for informal questions and  discussion at the end of the evening.  Setting cloth into the wider contexts of material and visual culture, the Group will provide a space for conversations about the politics of cloth from a distinctively cross-cultural viewpoint. 

The theme for our first meeting is 'Cloth & The Archive'; presenters will be Dr. Bharti Parmar and Dr. Wessie Ling. Read more about their ideas and research on the Library webpage.

The meetings will be convened by Dr. Christine Checinska, who is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of East London.