27th August 2025 Events
A dream of a common language – 13th to 28th September
A series of weavings by one of our members – Ali Holloway – exploring ways of communicating through woven textiles and the fundamental connection we have with cloth.
Town House Spitalfields, 5 Fournier Street London E1 6QE
13 – 28th September
Showing as part of Shoreditch Design Triangle 13 – 21st September
Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm Sunday 11.30am – 5.30pm
The title of the exhibition is from a poem by Adrienne Riche, expressing the possibility and impossibility of connecting and communicating with other people. Ali uses that idea to explore how woven pieces of cloth formed of interconnecting threads can communicate meaning.
Some of these pieces reference the human body and the connection that makes with us all, while others are woven using yarn with encrypted messages. This is created by binding skeins of silk with string, incorporating dots and dashes of morse code that spell out lines of poetry, phrases or song lyrics that Ali selects. Once bound, the silk is then dyed, dried and the string ties unwrapped before Ali weaves with the yarn, embedding the message in the cloth in the process. Inevitably in the act of weaving as the yarn travels back and forth through the warp on the loom, the words are jumbled up and no longer retain their meaning. They are no longer readable and so the possibility of communication is gone …
