My third year as lecturer at the Escola Massana Art School in Barcelona is coming to a close.  I´ve loved introducing young artists and designers to weave as an artistic language.  This year projects have focussed on political, historical, identity and materials-based themes.  Students have worked incredibly hard over an 8 month period to be able to conduct a meaningful dialogue between material, technique, concepts and the development of a personal expressive language.  Every student has developed an individual and totally different approach, showing just how versatile and surprising approaches to textile art can be with allied with loom-based work.

Students on the Postgraduate Applied Art course at the Massana Art School come from a range of different backgrounds – including photography, fashion, industrial design, graphic design.  They sometimes come with preconceptions and fixed ideas about loom-weaving which I tend to challenge.  For example, the aim of the postgraduate course is not to create figurative tapestry, traditional textiles nor ethnic textiles.  And whilst I am rigorous in introducing students to some basic loom techniques – I see technique as the building blocks of a language.  Their objective is not to create a dictionary of words but to use these textile elements to create visual poetry.  Technique is a means to an end and students need to see technique as a starting point, and a means of expression of ideas and not an end in itself.  I encourage students to develop their own techniques and to use non-traditional materials, such as wire yarns, and to manipulate fabrics and other textile objects off-loom;  to see the woven element as just one stage in the creation of artworks which move us, stimulate us, and challenge us.

Outcomes may be sculptural and three-dimensional, large or small-scale, they may be hybrid projects which combine constructed textiles with ceramics or jewellery (the Postgraduate Applied Arts course at the Massana offers these two modules as well and students have the chance to use the workshops and incorporate elements of these techniques, materials and languages in their textile work).

The focus of my teaching is to break through the standard cliches about what loom-based textile art can be, to challenge the limited way of thinking that many seem to have about what loom-based or loom-inspired art can be about, and invite students to consider the potential of using threads and fibres to construct meaning, atmosphere, to communicate ideas and feelings, and to explore and play with the immensely rich universe of symbols and metaphors that threads, weave and fabrics offer us.  Ideas of fragility, of social fabric, of community and solitude, identity, gender, of time and history are intimately connected to weave, which has accompanied human cultures from the Neolithic onwards.   And yet, weave is infinitely adaptable.  Threads can talk about political tensions, challenge ideas about truth, and political ideologies, about what is real, about what it means to be human.  Let us not forget that loom weavers were the first to use binary language to create objects, explore mathematical-based patterns and constructions, and a visual language – long before computers were invented.  Woven textiles and constructed threads can rise to the challenge of representing, like no other material, ideas of networks, order and connected-ness – and their opposites – of disintegration of the social fabric, and of chaos and broken-ness.  I try to encourage my students to connect with the big, current themes which concern them most – and develop their own textile language to develop their ideas and communicate through their work.

This idea persists – even within the world of textile design and art and is nothing more than ignorance and a certain closed attitude.  The loom can be a spring-board for ideas, the act of weave a metaphor for life and time itself.  Weave as not simply technique, and certainly not simply about the creation of “flat rectangular pieces of fabric”.  Although I take students through an intensive introduction to basic (and not so basic) weave techniques and loom preparation in term 1, the Postgraduate course invites a very open approach to creating personal textile languages.
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