‘Hanging By a Thread’ at Sunny Banks Mill
Dates: 11.10.25 – 24.12.25
David Fox is a hand weaver and textile artist who explores materials and form, with an interest in textile heritage. His studio is at Sunny Bank Mills in Farsley just outside of Leeds, and is also known as Fox on the Sley. He studied a BA (Hons) in Textile Design at the University of Leeds
His weave practice experiments with double cloth structures, three dimensional forms playing around with yarns that hold memory and shape, from paper to steel mixes including cotton and wool. He weaves on a George Wood Dobby Loom and various table looms to create textiles that unpacks or retells textile heritage and has close relationship and developing practice with Sunny Bank Mills Museum and Archive.
The archive ‘touchstone’ was formed from his BA in which he was inspired by the archives physical objects, oral histories and the mills’ architecture. Fox believes our heritage is also our future and we should hold onto the memories, the objects and the knowledge. We need to look back as well as forward. Recently he has been developing and building on his practice, which has ended up collaborating with glass created by Liz O’Connell.
Liz O’Connell completed her MA at the National Glass Glass centre she weaves with glass threads and creates glass textiles that explore our psychological connections to thread, such as: fixing and mending, the state of ‘losing one’s thread’, and being ‘threadbare’ .. she is particularly interested in the selvedge ..how glass remains frayed. Her interest in ‘ Emotional Fabric’ comes from her experience working formerly as a family and single parent worker.
Liz and David Fox are both interested in Heritage and through their research in Archives she met David Fox at Sunny Bank Mills and they have begun exploring the craft persons relationship with their process, rifling though notebooks and sample materials, at both Sunny Bank and Bradford College Textile Archive. They begun blending two practices and to create woven pieces from notes and giant Glass bobbins at the National Glass Centre, helped by mentors expertise using the lathe. David’s weaving skills pushing forward both making processes, responding to Liz’s glass and incorporating the glass into woven textiles.
‘Hanging by a Thread‘ by David Fox and Liz O’Connell is a collaboration of their crafts, in correspondence to these crafts being under threat and facing uncertain futures. Liz and David have started to create a body of work from woven cloth with giant glass bobbins trapped in pleats, to glass woven into the cloth and a collection of tools made up of glass and parts of objects from the weaving process, wrapped and secured with yarn and rubber bands. These in response to detailed technical students notes at Bradford College Archive and a Warp Twister’s handmade and collection of tools from Sunny Bank. 
David and Liz both were separately fascinated with A Warp Twister’s Tools and Tins from Sunny Bank Mills Museum and Archive from the 1960s. The tools were hooks and knives used for threading a loom. It was common for workers to create, pass down or purchase their own tools for the trade, the mill did not supply them. David has wrapped and dismantled loom parts to create new tools which are from the weaver who had his equipment before him. Liz has recreated glass weaving tools; some are robust others are objects of craft memory. This formed A Mill Workers Tools, 2025.
These works touch on pressure and erosion of heritage skills and the potential loss of knowledge. To them archives are a touchstone and invite conversations, exploration as well as memories for the public and themselves. The collaboration formed very naturally starting with the initial interest in the Warp Twister’s Tools and Sunny Bank.
Working together has encouraged both to experiment and push their own but each others practices further. They have found the joy in making through this uncertain time through working together, bouncing ideas and producing outcomes. They met with Anna Turzynski Curator of Sunny Bank Mills Gallery and she saw the importance and urgency within the work, and offered to have the work in Broken and Makeshift Exhibition at Sunny Bank Mills.
Text & images: With thanks to David Fox/Liz O’Connell
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