“Out of Place”: Cross-Cultural Collaboration and Virtual Space

Abstract

Through the lens of the exhibition “Out of Place” (OOP), this paper investigates the commonalities between textile practices in the post-industrial cities of Manchester, UK and Hangzhou, China. By considering works that may exist on the periphery of textile practice, questions are raised concerning the shifting notion of textiles, particularly in regions that have deep textile histories. Through the reflections of Kate Egan, who curated the exhibition, and drawing upon the research of the fellow authors and their situatedness in Manchester, this article explores the notion of a virtual space in relation to the methods of communication employed throughout the Manchester-Hangzhou collaboration. Virtual space is presented here as an environment in which “textile narratives” take shape within and across different sites, examining contemporary methods of communication, collaboration and curation. Connecting Manchester and Hangzhou with this virtual space, the article expands the dialogue between artists at Manchester School of Art and China Academy of Art by reflecting on a common language of textiles and our contemporary manifestations of material culture.

Keywords:

• Cross-cultural
• virtual space
• textiles
• digital
• manchester
• hangzhou
• china

Introduction

This article discusses “Out of Place” (OOP), a satellite exhibition to the 2021 Textile and Place conference and ongoing project, curated by Kate Egan.¹ OOP saw interactions between people, cultural sites and textiles occurring through the independent activities of two art schools located in post-industrial cities and the dialogue between them: Manchester School of Art and the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Through the reflections of Egan, this paper discusses the OOP project from the perspective of Manchester School of Art, which is geographically and culturally located within the post-industrial city of Manchester in the UK.

The online exhibition included the work of ten practitioners, connected to both institutions, who are working at the margins of traditional hand-making and through parallel strands, incorporating digital technology in the realization of tangible sculptures and objects, utilizing virtual movement, 3D printed textile interfaces and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). This cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural exhibition opened discussions through materials and technologies, and their cross-fertilization, asking how traditional and local practices, and situated knowledge can underpin emergent versions of textile art practice. At the same time as works were being selected from practitioners in the UK and China for the exhibition, OOP was informed by and expanded from an online exhibition into a virtual “studio” space through a series of interlinking exchange projects between staff and students at both institutions. During the period of the global pandemic with no face-to-face exchange, these projects precipitated a deeper focus on collaboration through online and virtual means. As a result, the collaboration with China became multi-layered with interactions, conversations, teaching and making across sites through virtual means.

While the project approach is many-sided, so too is our definition of textiles. Within this paper, and within the OOP exhibition, textile practices are articulated as artistic presentations in an online exhibition context. Built upon the place-based, textile heritage of Manchester and Hangzhou, the textiles exhibited in OOP and discussed here, draw upon the legacy of textile manufacture, design and material development in their respective post-industrial regions. As the boundaries of art, textiles, design and research become blurred, we consider textiles in abstract and intangible forms as well as process-led, practice-based iterations, always returning to the artistic presentations of textiles within the exhibition.

Through this shift we nevertheless argue that the textiles produced by those working in places defined through the histories of textile production, such as Manchester and Hangzhou, retain a cultural imprint, “the mnemonic energy and properties of textiles, in particular their capacity to ‘hold’ memory” (Hunt 2014, 208). The role of digital technologies and their relationship to traditions of craft and located histories of manufacturing are the context for conceptualizing a future of textile making, in this case in artistic form. This article draws upon insights of the OOP exhibition and wider project to propose the virtual as an extension of place, providing space for cross-cultural collaboration and casting a lens on the deep textile associations and practices of each site.

The OOP Exhibition

An initial collaborative relationship between the two art schools came about following a research trip to China in 2019, in which Egan was invited to speak at Old Cloth New Art: Fabric on the Move, a symposium held at the Fiber Art Department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. During this visit she developed links with Professor Assadour Markarov of the China Academy of Art, making connections between these post-industrial “textile” city art schools which educate students in textile/fiber arts. The fiber art curriculum at the China Academy of Art aims to “integrate exhibition with academic teaching” (Xu 2023, 11) whilst at Manchester School of Art teaching employs and embeds a “tacit understanding of materials through experimentation and engagement with external clients and contexts”.² The history of silk production provides the backdrop for the internationally recognized Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art (whose 4th presentation in 2022, developed aspects of the OOP project further), whilst the histories of cotton production in Manchester inform the cultural landscape of its museums, such as the Whitworth Art Gallery with its contemporary textile art collection, and wider regional contemporary presentations such as the British Textile Biennial based in Lancashire. These rich parallels locate the enduring intuition of textiles rooted in place.

Originally conceived as a student exchange project, an extension to the collaboration was proposed to include a physical exhibition of staff work from both institutions to coincide with the Textile and Place conference (planned for 2020). In 2020 the world was plunged into lockdown through the global pandemic. The Textile and Place conference was delayed until 2021 when it was then moved online along with the OOP exhibition and its associated staff and student projects, as a result of ongoing restrictions. As highlighted by Spruce and Moriaty, “[a] key impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across Higher Education was the accelerated use of emergent technologies” (2021, 1). Prior to this engagement with digital technologies in support of “day-to-day studio-based teaching” had been modest (Spruce, Thomas, and Moriaty 2021, 96), despite the broader increase in engagement with technology in society. The pandemic not only promoted online dialogue as a necessity to “keep in touch” but consequently determined a de-anchoring of the physical aspects of “textiles” and of “place.”

All three authors of this article are based in Manchester, with research and practice that seek to identify dynamic, place-based connections between textile processes, technology and people. Kate Egan teaches on the BA (Hons) Textiles in Practice programme at Manchester School of Art and has worked simultaneously as an artist, lecturer and maker for the past thirty years. Egan’s research explores new materialism in relation to the expanded field of textiles, specifically interactive coded interfaces, with e-textiles and embroidered & 3D printed surfaces. Bethany Turner-Pemberton’s research explores Greater Manchester’s sense of identity through the lens of textiles. Her research brings together textile practices and industries from across the region to address notions of decline and recontextualize the sector, acknowledging the interdisciplinary and interconnected nature of textile production in the region today. Gemma Potter’s practice explores digital and physical forms of making, drawing upon textile processes. Her recent doctoral research, which investigated intersections between craft and digital gaming, continues to question how material practices are reconfigured with, and through, technology and virtual spaces. Although not all of the authors here are exhibited within the OOP exhibition, they all participated in the 2021 Textiles and Place conference as panel chairs and interviewers during the programme of events. The interconnected nature of their research and its situatedness in Manchester play an important role in understanding the historical, virtual and contemporary textile landscapes at play within OOP. Written collaboratively in physical and virtual spaces, the authors have employed the themes of the article in their authorship and broader research.

Reflections on the OOP Project

To consider the shifting notion of textiles in relation to digital and virtual space alongside materials and process, we reflect upon the development of the OOP project. This includes Egan’s reflections upon curating the work for the exhibition from her physical location within Manchester (see Figure 1) as well as being a featured artist who uses digital technology in her work. This article also draws upon her reflections of the use of collaborative online digital spaces, including Miro, for gathering and collating information as well as working across the two institutions through a series of student and staff projects.

Figure 1 Color in Space. Kate Egan 2021. Photo credit: Michael Pollard.

Using a phenomenological approach in which interpretation is shaped by the researcher’s own experiences and background (Creswell 2007), the methods used within this research grew out of Egan’s practice as both textile artist and practice-based lecturer, embedded within Manchester School of Art. Through retrospective reflection-on-action (Schön 1983; Gray and Malins 2004), thoughts and interpretations of the project were gathered also through the use of a virtual Miro board. This board, shared with the coauthors of this paper, along with the online spaces used throughout the project, acted as “off-loading devices” (Gray and Malins 2004). This extended space enabled the depositing of ideas and tracing of how one thing led to another as well as the sharing of prompts to promote further reflection.

Within this paper and the exhibition, “Out of Place” is a concept used to express a space where the verve of textiles creates interactions between people, physical place and virtual space. “Out of Place” is also used to suggest processes that sit on the margins of defined practices, such as weave and knit, with other material processes subverted through technologies and alternative materials. As hybrid practices they cross fertilize across old and new methods to shift and expand notions of textiles. In doing so we address our understanding of materiality by questioning the relationship between hand making and technology. In this paper we use the motif of “Out of Place” in three ways:

1. Out of place: as originating from a particular place.

2. Out of place: as sitting on the margins of textiles.

3. Out of place: as conversing within and across virtual space.

As such, the paper is structured to first explore the historical contexts of the textile cities in which the two institutions sit. We then go on to discuss the expanded field of textiles through the work included within the OOP exhibition. The term “expanded field” is ascribed to an essay on sculpture by Kraus who wrote that it had been “stretched in an extraordinary display of elasticity to include just about anything” (Hunt quoting Kraus 2014, 209). Using Hunt’s concept of an “expanded field” for textiles—which she describes as, “disparate sources of theory and practice to be addressed under an umbrella term which represents a dynamic and wide-ranging set of critical practices” (Hunt 2014, 209)—textiles moves away from its physical form, much as the locations are points of departure, whilst still tethered in their place of origin. We use the English term textiles and, more specifically, refer to art-textiles, textiles used for its conceptual and material resonance, and which draws from textile manufacturing and design. The use of the term fiber art is synonymous and used more commonly as the English translation in China.

The final section of this paper reflects upon the emergence of the virtual as an extension of physical place which we describe as sitting within an archipelago, linking with Adamson’s concept of craft as a “constellation of stars” (2007, 6). Through seeing Manchester and Hangzhou as constituencies within a textile cluster, separate and distinctive sites within a connected chain, OOP formulates active sites that are occupied in the virtual and populated by ideas and defined by and through textile practice.

Out of Place: As Originating from a Particular Place

Perhaps more than any other art practice, the materials and processes of textiles are inextricably tied to the geographical locations in which they reside. Textiles are socially enacted, tangled around communities, cultures, and spaces. They record history, ground the present and feel forwards into the future. Making may range from the intricacies of artisanal craft to the technological or scientific practices of e-textiles, but these processes remain rooted in the culture of their location, the sensibilities of the workers and makers and the processes of tradition and technology. These textile geographies are woven into the very fabric of the post-industrial cities of the OOP project, and despite the slow decline of heavy industry in Manchester and the change of production in Hangzhou, intangible textile narratives continue to develop in these regions today.

The OOP exhibition drew upon the heritage and tacit knowledge of textile and place, finding correspondences between narratives of the history of cotton production in Manchester and of silk production in the city of Hangzhou. Egan’s contribution to this collaborative project was located within the city of Manchester, which owes its prosperity to the production of cotton. Once titled the Queen of Cotton (Reach, 1972), the city is famed for its role in the Industrial Revolution, when it facilitated early technological advances without which cotton processing would not have been the same. Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny, Crompton’s Spinning Mule and Arkwright’s steam-driven textile mill provided the foundations for Cottonopolis: the most fruitful cotton processing region in the world (Nevell, 2018). Ideally positioned within Lancashire’s famously damp climate and vast canal network, Manchester was perfectly situated to spin, and weave imported cotton and to orient its already established laboring hand-loom weavers toward mechanized methods of mass production. Macclesfield, a town in close proximity to Manchester, established itself as key to the silk industry from the 17th century until well into the 20th century. Silk dyeing using natural ingredients and the water of the local River Churnet produced the celebrated black dye called ‘raven-black.’ It is these revolutionary technological advances that set the scene for the Manchester and its neighboring towns, of today as a hub of research, textiles, and technology.

When considering the impact of technology within post-industrial cities, we conjure images of hi-tech, contemporary technologies such as computer-based machines and materials. For the purposes of this writing, we also consider technology to encompass the previously acknowledged digital mediums and as knowledge applied to machinery or equipment for a practical purpose.

For most of the nineteenth century, the textile industry retained its position as Manchester’s greatest employer (Reach 1972). The technological advancements of the age ensured the city could rapidly expand its production, pushing outwards, adopting satellite towns and engaging the power of the workers and the landscape. The scale of the region’s textile production required a host of supporting industries, including dyeing and finishing, and this highlighted the importance of practical education for the region’s citizens and led to an influx of skilled workers from across the UK and Europe. In response, Manchester’s mechanical colleges expanded their curriculums to address growing concerns that the region could not flourish without formal technical education. In an effort to provide the industry with British designs for printing and finishing textiles (Fowler and Wyke 1993), Manchester School of Design³ was established in 1838. The infrastructure of the city grew in line with the needs of the textile trade, adapting to the requirements of the industry and cementing its dominant position in global textile processing. Today, Manchester School of Art acts as a catalyst for creativity and collaboration across the region and provided Egan, as curator of OOP, with a unique vantage point from which to view the textile and technological outputs of the city.

Despite the shrinking of the region’s textile industry in the 20th century, textiles retain an important place in the culture and identity of Greater Manchester. Central Manchester and the Oxford Road Corridor (Manchester’s Knowledge Quarter)⁴ show evidence of the vital textile connections that remain today. The historical Manchester School of Art building (built 1880-1881) remains in situ on this corridor, surrounded by newly built art and design facilities, while design and science unite at University of Manchester’s Department of Materials building. Textile research and innovation are highly prized in the region, with The Textile Institute, the National Graphene Center and The Whitworth Art Gallery’s textile collection situated on the Oxford Road Corridor. Contemporary textile practices and processes may appear vastly different to the textile production of the early industrial revolution, but the industry remains present in the region.

Although the textile infrastructure of Manchester has changed from mill to lab and from heavy industry to art and innovation, evidence of inherent textile narratives still stitches the city together today. Manchester’s multicultural identity is rooted, first in the trade and production of textiles and then in textile-based research as a continuous thread that runs through the region and its citizens in intangible ways. The Mancunian sense of place, in both physical and abstract terms, is forged within a place-based network of textiles. Manchester School of Art’s Professor of Design for Sustainability, Stuart Walker, suggests that these shared textile identities are found in “creative roots, place-based creative ecologies and deep understandings of cultural significance” (Walker 2018, 3). These ecologies are not confined to traditional practices of textile production but continue to evolve through cultural change, embodied understanding, and social engagement through time. The continuous and ever-evolving thread of textiles is reflected in the broad selection of work for OOP, connected by a rootedness in textile making and processes while representing the pioneering technological spirit of the 21st Century city.

Silk production in Hangzhou, known as the home of silk, dates back to the Liangzhu Culture (3400 − 2250 BC). When the “Southern Song Dynasty established its capital in Lin’an, the silk weaving houses, embroidery houses… relocated to Hangzhou” (Guangsheng 2022, 3). In the Qing Dynasty (1644 − 1911), the city had many silk workshops, and in recent years, along with the rapid economic development of the city, the “Home of Silk" continues to define the city’s identity (Bian, Cao, and Ren 2017, 132). The China Academy of Art in Hangzhou houses the Department of Fiber Art which it approaches as an artistic discipline in contemporary art. Moving beyond the defining silk studio manufacture, the focus is on material-based media utilized to explore “the boundaries between social context and human spirit in a variety of material-based media…to combine Chinese and Western art spirits… [and] continually explore and improve the modernity of the Oriental spirit” (Hui N.D.: online). This practice ideally situates The China Academy of Art for inclusion in the OOP exhibition and the wider project. Their positioning of textiles as fiber art challenges understandings of traditional textile making and acknowledges inter- and cross-disciplinary textile materials and practices, blurring conventional boundaries. Professor Shi Hui, a key artist in contemporary Fiber Art in China set up the ‘Fiber and Space Art Studio’ within the Department of Sculpture at the China Arts Academy in 2003, building upon the legacy of the Institute of Art Tapestry “Varbanov”(IATV)/now Contemporary Fiber Art Research Center/, at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) which was founded in the 1986 by Maryn Varbanov, a Bulgarian artist. Shi Hui describes how Varbanov, “open[ed] the vision of a new generation of avant-garde artists in China” (Hui 2009, 10). Varbanov’s approach moved textiles away from its two-dimensional form primarily into sculpture, or what “can be called a three-dimensional space occasionally involving the Fourth Dimension of time… it offered a global new vision while urging them [the artists] to trace back to the history of the nation and re-start the grand narration by nourishing on origin of tradition” (ibid). Assadour Markarov furthers this practice of use textile and fiber to explore the material, space and thought as a “lively ‘weaving’ language” (Hui 2009, 11). Shi Hui was instrumental in launching the Hangzhou International Fiber Art Triennial in 2013, “which has become a new landmark in the world of contemporary fiber art … injecting new vitality into Hangzhou, a city rich in traditional oriental culture” (Guangsheng 2022, 3) and which uses the Silk Museum as the host site. It is in the context of the 4th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, that this project can be viewed, “seek[ing] to acquire inspirations from ‘fiber’…and build a broad cognition and approach beyond the limits of physical substances and material forms” (Jinfei 2022, 8).

The loop between Manchester and Hangzhou is in effect closed through the series of OOP activities, that ultimately led to presentations within the 4th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art in 2022.

The work by practitioners linked with the cities of Manchester and Hangzhou in the OOP exhibition (irrespective of the level technological innovation employed) reflect these creative ecologies rooted in deep connections with the culturally significant textile practices of their respective regions. Through the collecting of work within an online environment, the physical properties of the textiles are virtually reproduced yet remain irremovable from physical place. The exhibition acts as a ‘snapshot’ of time, demonstrating how textiles is shifting and changing its relationship with place in the context of these post-industrial cities, harnessing innovation and technological advancement without diminishing its roots in textile heritage.

Out of Place: As Sitting on the Margins of Textiles

The selection of artists included within the exhibition was informed by a drive to depart from established textile descriptions, to demonstrate expressions and iterations of ‘textiles’ with new and old tools; the ‘new’ being tools of virtual visualization, digital manufacturing, Arduino and code; the ‘old’ being hand knotting, papermaking, embroidery and knitting. Noticeably, the resulting ‘textiles’ represent a collection of traditional art textiles and other associated works that did not fit comfortably into the typical cannons of textile practice; they were literally “out of place.”

A proportion of the works included in the exhibition involve traditional practices that rely upon handwork and skill, whilst other practitioners rely solely on making with digital technologies, nevertheless, underpinned with knowledge of textile techniques and in relation to indigenous materials and practices. A group of the works use natural materials and draw upon traditional methods rooted in their locality which are reconsidered through film and screen. Christina Hesford’s piece Matter, you matter (What I do matters too), portrays the value of skill and its relationship with material in a performative film. She represents the durational aspects of labor through the repetition and rhythm of hand making, weaving and knotting in particular sequences which echo the human presence in mechanization and production. The unseen is made visible through the lens of screen to reflect on prior practices, industrial and human endeavor and the connection with Manchester’s social and economic history of weaving. Hannah Jones draws upon the traditions of pioneering and innovative Manchester/Macclesfield based master dyer Thomas Wardle in the late 19th century, whose experiments fused the disciplines of science and textiles, in the development of natural silk dyeing (King 2013). Jones examines bio-based design materials, going beyond dyeing to the foundations of material production which avoid traditional textile pollutant methods. Lliw Lleol (Local Color) is a comprehensive digital database of natural dyes and non-woven/fused material made from locally foraged plants and weeds collected locally. These ‘new’ fabrics and colors reconceive former practices reliant on technologies that formulate the substance and sourcing of the raw material itself.

The Animal Series by Assadour Markarov also uses indigenous pliable natural materials, sisal, bamboo and handmade paper (the latter being a heritage material of ancient China) but in combination. He further collides natural materials with hard structural components such as metal and steel to create site-specific works which play with illusion. When seen through the screen as photographic images, light weaves through the structures of twisted and knotted lines, they appear as animal forms climbing buildings as though they are urban guerillas, reclaiming the post-industrial architectural frame. These works question the impact of urban industrialization and the digital era on the environment and its populations, human and animal.

Shi Hui, similarly, revives ancient Chinese paper techniques but in this case creates a poetic memorialization, “老墙—Old Wall”:

Old Wall—A white wall: a clear memory, a photograph in time.

Old Wall—A fake wall: the materials were replaced, hiding the true meaning.

Old Wall—A varying wall: extending into different spaces, straight into people‘s hearts.

Old Wall—An old wall: it leaves unanswered questions and traces in our poetic dwelling.

What is solid and perceived as permanent in Hangzhou becomes more fragile through its paper reconstruction. The poem connects across the physical and the virtual sites, alluding to the shifting of knowledge and material production. Hui’s traditional craft knowledge and skill is used to conceptualize textile as ‘Wall,’ that defines identity as attached and located through a sensation of place. The sculptural work of both Hui and Markarov stays true to Varbanov’s defining vision for textile at the time of the foundation of the China Academy of Art. He described how ‘fiber’ as an artistic medium operates as material language in dialogue with complex issues of identity, provenance and place.

A further group of artists use textiles as a means to examine the personal and in relation to the body and firmly locating experience in the city in the present moment. Ruan Yuelai’s work portrays the isolation and sensation of remoteness during the pandemic period 2021 onwards. The Birthmark of Angles, uses the image of a seal onto cracked surface patterning to represent the shape of fourteen anti-epidemic martyrs who discovered the Covid-19 virus and died in Wuhan hospital. Viewed as a video, this technology-based work is coded in order to encourage audience interaction. By repeatedly waving a hand at the surface of the artwork the images of the martyrs emerge from within the cracked abstract surface. In its iconography and material reference Yulei is in Hangzhou, connected to the events in Wuhan and the wide global community during the pandemic period. Her work tells how this seismic event disconnects and reconnects us with communities we are part of. Egan’s own work, Color in Space, relies on similar interactive movement by combining layers of embroidery with e-textiles. The work uses light, sound and movement sensors that respond to changes and shifts in the local surroundings and through audience interaction. The work exists in two states, firstly as a stand-alone traditional embroidered surface and secondly as a dynamic surface that comes alive through movement, facial recognition and human encounter, textiles thereby adopts an ‘agency’ (Igoe 2018). Egan acknowledges the shifting dynamic of the environment, shaped through its history and which continues to inform the everyday contemporary experience. Egan questions how through navigating this urban space habitually, we change the balance of influence, meeting our surroundings in the present, evolving histories in relation to our participation with the textile themes that endure and shape the contemporary space. Egan describes her approach through the lens of Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith’s humanizing technology, where through embedding technology seamlessly within the textiles it “synthesizes art and science helps to restore homeostasis and return us to equilibrium” (2017: online), in relation to allowing humans to lead better-connected lives. In this way the work enables us to digitally project our human existence onto a screen, which encourages physical movement within the textile substrate. Thereby we can imagine ourselves both connected to a place and untethered from it.

This untethering is accelerated through technologies where various artists reconsider forms of materiality and its potential for sustainable production. Clare Calveley seeks to create movement with textiles which exist only in a digital space, similarly conceptualizing this letting go beyond the solidity of material form and yet informed by the deep knowledge of its production. Her work TRANSvisualACTION comprises of digitally rendered textiles which appear to move as virtual dynamic fabrics as though inhabiting a physical world. This work questions the manufacture of material as a process of the physical production and of post-industrial futures in relation to the balance of environmental and human interaction.

Mark Beecroft’s Interlooped works are informed by hand knitting technique. Beecroft’s seamless ‘knitted’ objects are not produced with knitting needles but through coded algorithms that reproduce the structure of complex links to create tubular and multi-faceted printed forms. These textiles whilst presented as artifacts in the exhibition, connect with the manufacturing histories of Manchester, through seeking to create ‘new’ textiles that rely upon adaptable fabrication methods that are sustainable and productive. Exquisitely fine and well-crafted they sustain and apply textile skill, through tacit understandings of what materials do.

Andrew King signposts a new concept of materiality and textiles. His NFT Cryptoknitties use generative character design where the NFT characters use procedurally generated materials that simulate tactile materials with Augmented Reality (AR) that has evolved to include AR functionality. These are simulated textiles do not exist in physical form at all and indicate how textiles can be rendered simply as a conceptual form. These works indeed question whether the relationship with place has become totally disconnected. They have no link to any place except the digital realm and the computer generated non place. They provoke questions about the transition of knowledge, how it is attached to place and never realized, touched or experienced in any physical encounter.

Textile processes and their associated materials is acknowledged across the OOP exhibition and draws upon the heritage and culture of tacit practices in both Manchester and Hangzhou while simultaneously departing from established textile limitations. In so doing new spaces are formulated as emergent textile communities.

Out of Place: As Conversing within and across Virtual Space

A dialogue between the two art schools was facilitated by online platforms which informed the realization of the OOP project. It was here that sites and material practices converged through virtual means, allowing a digital community to emerge. Whilst discussing communities within the digital spaces, Daniel Hardegger argues that “[e]very person who enters the virtual … is still anchored within a ‘real’ place” (2022, 2) and is thus still influenced by their physical environment. For Hardegger, this includes not only the physical location of the place the person resides in when they join the virtual space, but also factors such as culture, language, religion and politics. For Egan and Markarov, their colleagues and students, engaging in the many strands of the OOP project required joining the shared virtual space via online platforms from their physical locations (be that their home, their respective art schools, or another third location) in Manchester and Hangzhou. While doing this, the project remained rooted in textile sites of production and trade, resulting in a dialogue that was historically situated.

To plan the various aspects of OOP and its linked projects, Egan and Markarov initially used WeChat, an app similar to WhatsApp that is commonly used in China, to communicate. As communication developed further, they chose to include the use of common online platforms including Miro. This visual collaboration platform was used to gather and collate information for the online exhibition, with each artist having an allocated space within a seemingly limitless virtual ‘board’ to place their data.

Concurrent to exhibition planning, the OOP project developed to include exchange projects with additional Miro boards used to act as “an ad-hoc digital studio environment” (Spruce and Moriarty 2022) where members of the cross-cultural community come together virtually. Just as Spruce and Moriaty found during remote teaching, “Miro provided an easily accessible whiteboard space for remote sharing of thoughts and ideas” (2022, 2). For the collaborative staff and student projects within the OOP project processes of sharing included a series of live “happenings” and workshops that occurred asynchronously, at times to suit the time difference between the two cities. These ‘happenings’ were supported by the use of an additional online platform, Padlet where ‘online calling cards’ enabled collaborators to connect with each other. Padlet provided a space to share a visual snapshot of each textile artist’s work, including a written statement. The linear nature of Padlet’s design interface enabled collaborators to identify with each other at the beginning of the collaboration and helped initial conversations flow.

As the project extended across these virtual online spaces, the unspoken language of textiles enabled collaboration through the communities’ existing shared knowledge, with images, drawings and tests shared and received with an immediate understanding. The coming together of identities within a shared virtual space was vital in establishing connections across the two sites. The online interface provided a seemingly place-less archipelago, upon which the identities, lived experiences and place-based textile practices of the group could be brought together. When verbal communication was limited, the common language of textiles transcended, opening dialogue beyond the specific place setting as a mediating, connecting, intercultural discourse. As Sonja Arellano describes her role as cultural intermediary in a participatory and socially engaged setting, textile highlights the value of “the rhetorical possibilities of non-alphabetic composing” (Arellano, 2022, 20). Within the OOP project the shared values of those living and working in Manchester and Hangzhou are viewed through a textile lens, shifting and evolving as the interaction develops, yet remaining rooted in the cultural legacy of their respective post-industrial regions.

Since its inception following Egan’s research trip to Hangzhou, the OOP project continues to extend through collaborative work across physical and virtual spaces. Even this paper has been written collaboratively through a combination of reflective conversations, shared notes and documents, in-person and online. The online experience of cross-cultural exchange has since moved to a physical space, working with the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art 2022, with a group of students in China and the UK co-curating an installation titled Growing House. The theme of the Triennial is described as “a fibrous unity of thought, emotion, labor, life and destiny” and one which “extracted infinite creation and growth from the simple tradition of fiber” (Xu 2023, 11). It “connects many countries with prosperous textile industries and rich craft history in Asian, Africa, Europe and Latin America, and weaves a tangible and colored fiber international community” (Xu quoting Jinfei, Shi Hui, and Tia 2023, 11). The virtualized space continues to be a collaborative space for discussion and has become embedded within the Growing House installation itself, where it functions as a shared site between the two locations.

Conclusion

Textiles, for those living and working in Manchester and Hangzhou, acts as a bridge across the divide of language and geographical distance, establishing a dialogue of thinking through making with textiles. The parallel histories of these cities are woven from their textile heritage and embellished with the contemporary, lived experiences of their textile-aware citizens. Likewise, throughout OOP’s iterations, textile heritage underpinned the methods of virtual communication, providing an unspoken familiarity and a common foundation, upon which a contemporary and dynamic material conversation can develop.

Through this paper we set out to readdress our understanding of materiality through the lens of textiles within the OOP project and exhibition. By examining the interconnected nature of hand making and technology and by considering the motif of ‘Out of Place’ in three strands, our understanding of place has shifted, challenged by our own engagement with physical place and virtual space during Textile and Place 2021, OOP and the writing of this paper.

Our reconceptualized understanding of place is inclusive of both physical and virtual spaces. We consider the virtual space as tethered to the historical roots of physical sites and view these virtual archipelagos as layers of place that overlap with the physical sites of the post-industrial cities. In doing so, a space is created between places, where we meet and move between the two sites through shared textile knowledge and language. For us, the OOP project has established a cluster of places that include Manchester, Hangzhou and virtual spaces that are activated by shared textile practices affirming our individual sense of place as we have reflected whilst working across sites. Intangible textile consciousness is reinforced through shared conversations and, even though some have let go of traditional practices, we see continuity within the expanded field. The comments from Lui Tian, the curator of the 4th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, reflect a similar concept, describing “theoria spaces” (Tian 2022, 24), which articulate ‘common thoughts, perceptions and actions’ (ibid) as physical sites within the exhibition. He goes onto to say that there are ‘clues’ to these thoughts intertwined in the space, ‘for people to stay and contemplate, thus hooking and capturing a broad understanding of art and creation contained in “the generalized meaning of fiber” (Tian 2022, 24).

Technology opens up what we mean by textiles making us reflect back on what we mean by place and is shaping how we work with technology and new materials. Across physical and virtual places, textiles act as a connecting chain, stitching together shifting notions of place. The commonalities of Manchester and Hangzhou expand across this archipelago, enveloping physical and digital processes and materials, and encompassing the virtual as a space where textiles can be experienced and shared. Instead of being ‘Out of Place,’ OOP has affirmed us as being ‘in’ a place, not removed us from it.

Acknowledgements

This paper is a result of collaborations and insights into the work of creative practitioners and researchers at China Academy of Art and Manchester Metropolitan University who contributed to the OOP exhibition and collaborative community in some form. Egan would like to acknowledge and thank Prof Assadour Markarov and Prof Shi Hui for their hospitality and insights during the research trip to China Academy of Art and for contributing their work to the exhibition. She would also like to acknowledge and thank Gill Thomas and Chris Wilson for their creative and technical input into Colour in Space.

Note: Bethany Turner-Pemberton’s research is funded by the AHRC through a collaborative doctoral award scholarship from the NWCDTP (North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Egan

Kate Egan has worked simultaneously as a practitioner and lecturer for the past thirty years. Kate teaches on the BA(Hons) Textiles in Practice programme and is curator for the Vertical gallery at Manchester Metropolitan University. Kate’s research interests are at the intersection of interactive e-textiles, art for public space and collaborative practice. She completed a major commission for the Bridgewater International Concert Hall in Manchester in 1996 and was presented to HRH Queen Elizabeth II. [email protected]

Bethany Turner-Pemberton

Bethany Turner-Pemberton is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at Manchester School of Art. She also works with arts and heritage organizations to facilitate workshops and events. Bethany completed a BA in Textiles in Practice and an MA in Contemporary Curating, both at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research sits at the intersection of textiles and curation, investigating how contemporary Mancunian textile narratives and their contribution to the culture of the region can be presented to museum audiences at Science and Industry Museum, Manchester.

Gemma Potter

Gemma Potter is a Research Associate at Manchester School of Art working within the Design and Craft research group. Her recently completed doctoral research explored crossovers between craft and video game play, asking what value these overlaps could provide for Industry in the North West of England. By utilizing creative practice, her research contributes to our theoretical understanding of the relationship between textile practices and video games, and it sheds light on the potential value of this relationship in contexts beyond individual practices through the creation of a series of “graft-games.”

Notes

1 The OOP exhibition can be visited via https://outofplace.myportfolio.com

2 Words taken from the BA Textiles in Practice Manifesto at Manchester School or Art, written by Programme Leader Mark Beecroft.

3 Manchester School of Design changed its name to Manchester School of Art in 1853, signalling victory for those in the region who believed that art education should be less vocational. Other colleges of art and design were established in the Manchester including Municipal School of Art, founded in 1892 by the institute now known as The Whitworth.

4 The newly branded Oxford Road Corridor is Manchester’s Knowledge Quarter. The corridor stretches south from the city centre and is home to institutions with specialist historical or innovative connections to research, business and culture.