Weaving Futures: Week 2 | Central Saint Martins BA Textile Students

Weaving Futures is an exhibition at London Transport Museum highlighting the importance of woven textile design to the London Transport system. The exhibition explores the process and making of digital woven textiles, as part of the Museums’, Designology season.

Each week, visitors will be able to see invited designers/artists in residence in the Designology studio, who will be working on a project brief and interacting with a weaver. The weavers will be interpreting the residents work live into digital woven textile prototypes and final works on a state-of-the-art TC2 digital jacquard loom. 

Week 2 features: Textile Students from Central Saint Martins BA ( Hons) Textile Design Course, who road tested the data brief for the Weaving Futures Season in May 2016. Four overall winners were chosen to have a residency in the Designology Studio at London Transport Museum.

Residency dates: 30th Nov  – 3rd December 2016
Activity days: 30th Nov & 2nd December 2016 

The Designology, Weaving Futures Studio is open at all the times the museum is open. Vistors very welcome

Weaving Future exhibition dates: 22 November 2016 to 18 February 2017

Michael Woods

(image above) As a designer, I find myself continually looking at the elements and surfaces that I encounter everyday.The style of my work often combines a background surface, layered on top with other elements, whether that is found materials, oil paint or a variety of mark making. My work is about contrasts between colours, textures and light.

For this project, I was inspired by the symbols and signs that we all encounter in the urban environment, especially in a rapidly changing city like London but that we unconsciously ignore.

I noted the variety of symbols and marks found on the road and pavements that provide fragments and information left behind from construction work, a visual language on the streets that few of us can make sense of.

Lily Thornton

Lily Thornton is a final year woven textile student at Central Saint Martins. She generates ideas through found and assembled fragments of everyday using Situationist methods of derive, interested in themes surrounding the overlooked and chance procedure.

Mimi ForrestMimi Forrest is a final year student on the BA Textile Design course at Central St Martins in London. Mimi’s work incorporates a variety of media, with concepts inspired by a love of colour, typography and pattern, developed into print solutions which combine a variety of materials and textured surfaces. Mimi has been collecting fragments of conversation whilst exploring Transport for London and using this data as inspiration to create pattern.

Phobe Sudderick

Phobe Sudderick is a final Year weave student at Central Saint Martins BA Textile degree Course. She states ‘My data project for LTM looked at movement on board the tubes. Standing on the tube, I let the way the tube ran along the tracks cause my pen to move round the page. I made these movement maps for roughly two months, and start to overlap them to see if there was a pattern. There was no pattern, the movements were erratic. However, shapes and layouts did begin to appear which I then took forwards into my weaves.

Other residents participating in the Weaving Futures season include: Assemble, Beatwoven, Philippa Brock, Camira, Central Saint Martins, BA Textile students, Samuel Dempsey, Linda Florence, Gainsborough Weaving Company, Eleanor Pritchard, Rare Thread : aka Kirsty McDougall & Laura Miles, Josephine Ortega, Ismini Samanidou, Studio Houndstooth: Jo Pierce, Takram & Priti Veja

Resident artists and designers have been invited to respond to a project brief; exploring the role of textiles in modern transport now and in the future. They will focus on ‘untapped’ sources of data generated by, or helpful to, the transport system. Their responses will then be interpreted into woven textiles, live for museum visitors.

Creative responses may span from future speculations on data capture and its textile use, to new methods of digitising human interactions, to creative interpretations and visualisations of existing TfL data sets.

The weavers for the season are Rosie Green & Hanna Vinlöf Nylen

Images and text courtesy of Michael Woods, Mimi Forrest, Lily Thornton, Phoebe Suddrick.