‘Weave’ symposium Sat 11th May 2013
Stroud International Textile Festival

A weave symposium now seems to be an annual event at Select 2013 in Stroud, Glos and enthusiasm for it has not dipped if attendance was any judge. In fact, the event could have sold twice as many tickets if space had allowed, which is heartening for all connected with weave.

This year’s event was chaired by Philippa Brock, with speakers grouped in twos; Laura Thomas paired with Deidre Wood, Eleanor Pritchard with Tim Parry Williams, and Nadia-Ann Ricketts alongside Helga Matos with a final presentation from Philippa. Q&A sessions followed each pairing with a final session of questions to the entire speaker panel.

Laura Thomas, in common with the other speakers, is a portfolio weaver, mixing commission and personal work with industrial collaborations. A regular at the Select 2013 she talked about developments of her Loose Thread acrylic pieces from the original concept of capturing the beauty of unwoven warp effects in resin blocks to now including unwoven weave techniques, such as threads creating colour-and-weave effects, and clasped weft tapestry techniques turned 90o to create unwoven clasped warp ikat effects.

Laura has developed the work further to incorporate wall pieces mounted on barrel fixings to allow for the play of shadows on the wall behind her pieces. Through her public art commissions, the ideas behind the resin pieces have grown both larger and more complex, with both threads and fabric sandwiched between panes of glass, starting with a Museumaker project at The Beaney in Canterbury where Laura had a series of 3 internal windows to address which joined the old museum at The Beaney with its new development. This was the first time Laura had used glass for her work and has led to further collaborations with the glass company. Another public art commission was for the Cynon Valley Hospital where she created 9 panels of loose threads picking up the colours from the hospital’s way-finding scheme. A recent commission from Llanelli is for a glass canopy for the town centre, in which she has incorporated industrial fibres such as carbon thread, folded steel mesh, folded copper mesh (which give moiré effects) and light-reflective yarns. An older commission, to create a presentation gift for the Australian Cricket Board, incorporated narrow bands of double-sided fabric which were twisted within a curved resin shape informed by the spin of a cricket ball. This linked neatly with the following speaker, who also features narrow bands in her work. www.laurathomas.co.uk/
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