A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory
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Overview
Textile is at once a language, a concept and a material thing. Philosophers such as Plato, Deleuze and Derrida have notably drawn on weaving processes to illustrate their ideas, and artists such as Ann Hamilton, Louise Bourgeois and Chiharu Shiota explore matters such as the seam, the needle and thread, and the flow of viscous materials in their work. Yet thinking about textile and making textile are often treated as separate and distinct practices, rather than parallel modes.
This beautifully illustrated book brings together for the first time the language and materiality of textile to develop new models of thinking, writing and making. Through the work of thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, and international artists like Eva Hesse and Helen Chadwick, textile practitioner, theorist and writer Catherine Dormor puts forward a new philosophy of textile. Exploring the material behaviours and philosophical language of folding, shimmering, seaming, viscosity, fraying and caressing, Dormor demonstrates how textile practice and theory are intricately woven together.
A Philosophy of Textile brings together the materiality, imagery and language of textile to develop practice-based modes of thinking, making and writing.
The first book to examine the philosophy of textile practice
A new, practice-based model for thinking and writing about textile practice
Brings together, but does not elide, theoretical and practice-based approaches to textile
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Textile as Making: techne between practice and theory
Weaving the Chapters
(Inter)mingling
Chapter One: Folding
An Unfolding of Making
Metaphorics and Metonymy as Enfolded Modes for Thinking
Textile–Space
La Maison Baroque
Folding–Seaming–Fraying
Chapter Two: Textile as Shimmering Surface
Veils: a space of scintillation
Faintly Gleaming
Illicit Encounters
Absurdity
Through the Looking Glass
Chapter Three: Seaming
Seaming as Passage
Hand & Machine Stitching
Seaming as Suturing
Seaming as Trace
Conjunctions & Crossings
Chapter Four: Textile as Viscous Substance
Attacking the Boundary
Collapsing Boundaries
Flow
Ontological Secretions
A substance between two states
Chapter Five: Fraying
Frayed and Fraying: a politics of translation
Frayed and Fraying Cloth: broken and contingent
To the Edge: pointing away from the centre
Worn Through
Fraying
Chapter Six: Textile as Caressing Subject/Object
Affective Touching
Proximity
Opening Out-Becoming
Measuring Distance
First Actions of Hands
Synoptic-Synesthetic Caressing
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The bibliography is extensive, giving an interesting insight into the metaphorical use of the words that textiles have made to the language.
Dormor provides a crucial model of integrated writing about practice that entwines the academic and creative voice. In the face of much writing that adopts linear models not because of their usefulness, but for lack of another model, here the academic and creative voice finally hold “theory” and “practice” as one.
- Title: A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory
- Author: Catherine Dormor
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 160
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781472587251, 9781350195837, 1350195839, 1472587251
- Resource ID: LLS:9781472587251
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T12:11:53Z
Catherine Dormor is a practising artist, Reader in Textile Practices and Head of Research Programmes and at the Royal College of Art, London UK.