Carrying the Craft: Four Making Conversations
16, 17, 22, 30 November & 1 December 2023, 5-7pm, Gallery North.
Carrying the Craft are informal, beginner-level sessions aimed at all staff and students with an interest in practice-based research methods to explore craft-based making as a carrier for the exchange and generation of knowledge between researchers and practitioners across disciplinary boundaries. Each session will be led by a different Cultural Negotiation of Science member; Christine Borland, Louise Mackenzie (2 sessions), Alis Oldfield and Laura Harrington - we are by no means skilled artisans, but making rituals and lived knowledge production are the embedded craft of our research and practice.
Four sessions in: flax processing and spinning, felting wool, machine knitting and kombucha fermentation will focus on knowledge passed on through making together, while sharing stories of materials and processes. As the Carrying the Craft hub, Gallery North becomes the non-aligned space for cross-disciplinary thinking and research co-creation while our hands are moving and making. We are indebted to writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft (1998) and The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986) for our title, foundational theory and methodology.
Carrying (home) the Craft
Friday 1 December 3-5pm, drop-in Gallery North.
This is an opportunity for reflections over a cuppa and to pick up work and materials. Guests are welcome to stay for the closing session - Grow your own Mother - Part 2, with Louise Mackenzie and Kaajal Modi, where ideas for future projects can ferment together.
All workshops have a limit of 12 and booking is essential via the named contacts. General enquiries contact christine.borland@northumbria.ac.uk
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Christine Borland: Flax Turns
Thursday 16 November 5-7pm, Gallery North.
An introduction to processing and hand-spinning flax into linen; open to everyone regardless of familiarity or experience with textiles. Christine will share her experience of growing and processing flax to linen fibre as the basis of recent art projects. Flax, drop spindles, and stick-distaffs will be provided and available to take home when the exhibition closes, along with flax seeds to grow next season. Flax is one of Europe’s oldest plant fibres and has both ancient and contemporary medicinal properties. During the 16th century, folklore and symbolism associated with flax became intimately linked to the demonised image of women as witches.
For bookings e-mail - christine.borland@northumbria.ac.uk or use the link below
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Louise Mackenzie: Grow your own Mother - Fermenting Care
Friday 17 November and Friday 1 December 5-7pm, Gallery North.
Grow your own Mother is a two-stage event that focuses on practices of care through fermentation and listening.
In Part 1, on Friday 17 November, drop in Gallery North to share tea with a live symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (commonly referred to as a SCOBY, or mother) that has been growing as part of the BioDwelling project at the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE) at both Newcastle and Northumbria Universities for over a year. Louise will share recipes for growing your own mother and discuss SCOBY making practices from the lab to the home. You will receive instructions and a SCOBY mother to take home with you. In Part 2, on Friday 1st Dec, you are invited to return to the gallery, where Louise will be joined by collaborator Kaajal Modi and the staff of Magic Hat Café, to ‘birth’ the mothers that we have grown over the course of the CNoS@10 event. Join us for a workshop to share the mothers you have grown at home and to discuss what the future holds for them – you might pass them on to others, eat or drink them, or dry them and use them as paper, leather, even weaving material.
For bookings e-mail - louise2.mackenzie@northumbria.ac.uk or use the link below
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Alis Oldfield: Machining Networks
Wednesday 22 November 5-7pm, Gallery North.
This workshop will give you a brief introduction to a Brother KH-830 knitting machine. Powered by hand and programmed by a punch-card system, it owes a legacy to the jacquard loom and helped inform the design of early computers. Learn how to cast on and change yarn on a simplified wooden version, before trying out your new skills on the needle bed and carriage of the knitting machine itself. Alis' research is concerned with networks both digital and cultural, infrastructural, and metaphorical - machine knitting a 'carrier bag' or container for this idea.
For bookings e-mail - alis.oldfield@northumbria.ac.uk or use the sign up link below.
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Laura Harrington: Felting (wonderful accidental anti-connections)
Thursday 30 November 5-7pm, Gallery North.
This workshop is about shared conversations whilst collectively felting. It is part inspired by the tradition of singling ‘waulking songs’ whilst fulling (waulking) cloth in Scotland and in part also by felting having the capacity to enrich discussions. Felting is a process that requires movement, moisture and animal fibre (wool). Through wetting, agitating and kneading, new forms accumulate, mat and come into being as microfibres within the wool mesh together. In the process of felting disparate and contrasting elements interact and relate together in unexpected and open-ended way, leading to something new. Together, as we felt, we will think and talk about friendship, landscapes, processes, artistic practice and the places where things meet.
For bookings e-mail - laura2.harrington@northumbria.ac.uk or use the sign up link below
Organiser Biographies
Christine Borland is an artist and Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University; her research draws on the interaction of individuals and communities with cycles of growing and processing plant fibres into cloth, aiming to build awareness of the environmental and colonial legacy of global textiles by connecting participants and audiences directly with their textile histories. Recent projects include Projection Cloth at the British Textile Biennale, Flax Turns Foundation Cloth at Deveron Projects, Huntly and In Relation to Linum at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh.
Louise Mackenzie, PhD, is an artist and researcher based in Newcastle, UK. Working across mediums and often engaging with fields outside of the cultural sector, her interdisciplinary practice is concerned with articulating human/material relationships through process, chance, appropriation, and translation. She is a Director of ASCUS Art and Science, Edinburgh, Lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee and researcher at both Newcastle and Northumbria Universities in the UK. Her artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including ZKM, Germany and BALTIC, UK and she has written for Bloomsbury, Manchester University Press, Intellect, Springer, Leonardo Journal (MIT Press) and PUBLIC Journal.
Dr Laura Harrington is an artist and CNos postdoctoral researcher whose work considers the complex relations between humans and landscapes through experimental fieldwork, cross-disciplinary research and collaborative working. Using a variety of methods and media, including filmmaking, installation, drawing, fieldwork and listening, Laura’s practice centres on ‘upstream consciousness’, a framework that connects rivers, peatlands and other upland and mountain ecologies to global currents. Her AHRC funded practice-based PhD upstream consciousness: exploring artists’ fieldwork through geomorphing, spiralling and co-productive ecologies at Northumbria University was interested in the capacity of artistic methods to support new forms of ecological thinking.
Alis Oldfield is an artist, CNOS PhD researcher and Lecturer at Birmingham City University. Interested in ecology, storytelling, craft and technology, her research project imagines the internet as a landscape with ecological systems, as a way to diagnose its health. The project questions whether the soil of the internet is sick, adopting a fiction-as-method art practice to ask how ecological thinking can help create a vital, life-sustaining future ‘in-terra-net.’ Recent projects include: Elan Valley Residency Programme (Aug – Aug 2022). Funded by Arts Council Wales & The National Lottery and in partnership with Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water. And; Cut Copy Remix at Vivid Projects and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
