You can’t see what we’ve done
2023Brenda Miller explores handmade, gestural acts of industrial production through experimental moving image. This film features conversations with women carrying out invisible mending as they check and repair high quality cloth for fashion designers and tailors so You can’t see what we’ve done.
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 repairs. This heritage practice of mending is still essential and done by hand much as it was over a hundred years ago.
Brenda utilises moving image as documentation of these experiences and employs a visible mending approach to cut, re-weave and embellish moving image to alter the appearance.
and printed textiles or visible
along with textiles incorporating digital fabric prints
and cloth artefacts
This process has become an approach to embellish moving image to alter and reconfigure.
Gathered through informal visits and conversations with women working within weaving mills in various parts of the UK, this work highlights an essential, yet invisible practice of mending often carried out by women. Seeking knots and flaws in the manufacturing process of high-quality cloth, the skilful process of repairing flaws within the weaving process is still done by hand, much as it was over a hundred years ago.
Over time Brenda has learnt to respect the work done by the professional women looking for knots and flaws in mills to produce high quality woollen cloth whether for billiard tables or Savile Row tailors.
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.