re-configured conversations
10-26 April 2026
Michael Pennie Gallery, Bath Spa University
Re-configured Conversations is an exhibition by artist Brenda Miller, first shown at the University of Wolverhampton for her PhD. Using experimental moving image and digitally printed textiles, the works have been gathered through informal conversations with women working in a variety of social groups and through an extended research project visiting women working in weaving mills in various parts of the UK.
About Re-Configured Conversations
Since the Lumiere brothers filmed their employees in La Sortie de l’Usine Lumiere in Lyon (1895), women working in the weaving industry are still required to repair cloth today. Darning requires the simplest of tools: needle, thread and scissors, the skills to use them to create invisible or visible repairs. Over time I have learnt to respect the work done by the professional women looking for knots and flaws in mills producing high quality woollen cloth whether for billiard tables or Savile Row tailors. This heritage practice of mending is still essential and done by hand much as it was over a hundred years ago.
Brenda explores these handmade, gestural acts of industrial production through experimental moving image, highlighting the time consuming and skilful process of invisibly repairing flaws within the weaving process that little is known about. Teams of women invisibly mending continues virtually unchanged in high tech industry, often kept invisible from clients. In recent years daring and mending has become a fashionable social activity. While skills in daring and mending used to be passed on in the home, it is now in decline since the availability of cheap clothing. Now mending groups meeting socially are reviving and sharing the skills needed to repair and repurpose clothing by stitching colourful visible repairs as a statement of social responsibility.
Drawing on concepts of de-skilling and re-skilling the workforce and definitions of repair (John Roberts 2007, Richard Sennett 2008, 2013), this exhibition looks at textile practice and skill in the age of manufacture and digitization and its potential relationship to the current turn to hand making. Industrially produced cloth requires the work of menders to disappear as they restore cloth to perfection. Brenda utilises moving image as documentation of these experiences along with textiles incorporating digital fabric prints and employs a visible mending approach to cut, re-weave and embellish moving image and cloth artefacts to alter the appearance and re-configured.
Brenda Miller has a BA Hons in Creative Arts from Bath Spa University, an MFA in Fine Art Practice from Goldsmiths College, University of London and a PhD from the University of Wolverhampton.
