re-configured conversations
Re-configured Conversations is an exhibition at the University of Wolverhampton of Brenda Miller's PhD work. Using experimental moving image and digitally printed textiles, the works have been gathered through informal conversations with women working during visits to weaving mills in various parts of the UK. 
Re-configured Conversations presents an overview of my practice, gathered through informal conversations with women working during short visits to weaving mills in various parts of the UK. This exhibition looks at textile practice and skill in the age of manufacture and digitization and its potential relationship to the current interest in hand making. Industrially produced cloth requires the work of menders to disappear as they restore cloth to perfection.
The work presented consists of experimental moving image as documents of my experiences and textiles incorporating digital fabric prints and employs a visible mending approach to cut, re-weave and embellish moving image and create cloth artefacts to alter the appearance and re-configured.
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.
My research explores through moving image that within industrial production there remains 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 darning and mending has become a fashionable social activity. While skills in darning 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.