Stitch hacking

The most interesting thing I saw at TENT London last week (aside from my fellow bricoleur Naomi Paul's divine pendant lights!) was a textile installation by product designer Henny van Nistelrooy, who is part of the JAMM Collective. All the designers were given off cuts from the Scottish wool company BUTE fabrics, and Henny created a series of textile covered screens, that were hung in mid air.

"Each of the fabric frames were created by unthreading the original textile weave to make a series of graphic shapes in the material".

So, he took a textile waste stream, hung it elegantly in some frames, and simply unpicked or 'hacked' the weave structures to create new textile structures. Simple and beautiful, and great to see a product dedsigner is is to in to textiles!

On the theme of hacking, the wonderful Amy Twigger Holroyd, who is now a fellow PhD candidate like me (at Birmingham City looking at fashion rights) has an exhibition on throughout October at Prick Your Finger, called Stitch Hacked.

As Amy says, "My 'stitch-hacking' technique allows me to create structural patterns within an existing piece of knitting, laddering and re-forming the stitches. I use this technique to insert personal information, such as my name, within the fabric of second-hand garments, and explore the idea of ownership."

Again, a simple but effective way of 'hacking'. Hacking ( term I believe originated from the computer hackers of the 1980's) is not about anarchists who flip the system and create a new one. The computer hackers worked within the system (in their context computer coding) learning how it works and changing it from within.

A nice analogy then for thes examples of stitch and weave re-structuring.