Weaving Futures: Week 13 | Rare Thread

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. Weaving Futures is curated by Philippa Brock and Samuel Plant Dempsey.

Each week, visitors will can see invited designers/artists in residence in the Designology studio, who will be working on a project brief and interacting with a weaver in their residency dates. 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 13 features: Rare Thread

Residency dates: 12^th – 14^th Feb 2017
Activity days: 13^th & 14^th Feb 2017

Rare Thread is a textile studio/collective conceived by Laura Miles and Kirsty McDougall and incorporates a team of designers and specialists including Ruth Greany, Stephanie Rolph, Sophia Fenlon and Hannah Auerbach George. There is a post with more details on The Weave Shed.

The designers of Rare Thread work collaboratively on collections and projects as well as retaining autonomy on other aspects of their practice.

With combined experience in industry of 35 years, Laura and Kirsty decided to merge their individual creative studio businesses to champion hand and machine woven textile design and finishing for a broad variety of textile outcomes including Fashion, Interiors and CMF to Material Development and Trend.

From their studio in Dalston, London- Rare Thread will celebrate, question and promote weaving in all its forms and contexts. The studio offers loom hire to emerging designers and industry and also offers support and advice to new graduates starting out in woven textiles.

Rare Thread welcome projects and collaboration from the fashion, interiors and manufacturing industries, artists and scientists alongside organisations and individuals interested in developing sustainable textile solutions.

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 :  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.

Weaving Futures is jointly Curated by Philippa Brock and Samuel Plant Dempsey. The weavers for the season are Rosie Green & Hanna Vinlöf Nylen.