In 2013, curator Daisy McMullan and I co-curated The Geometrics: Volume 1 at Kingsgate Gallery in London. The exhibition brought together artists and designers working through geometry, pattern, colour and material, including Camille Walala, Melanie Bowles, Ele Carpenter, Bridget Harvey, Tanvi Kant, Katherine May, Marie Molterer, Marie O’Connor and Clare Willard.
At the time, I was moving between several identities and contexts: artist, researcher, teacher, textile designer and founder of the Slow Textiles Group. I had spent many years within academic environments, but I was becoming increasingly interested in creating an independent space in which the experimental intelligence of textile practice could be encountered publicly.
The Geometrics emerged from that transition.
It was partly an exhibition, but I don’t think I ever understood it simply as a collection of finished objects. What interested me was everything that surrounds the finished work: the drawings, experiments, material decisions, conversations, references, failures, repetitions and transformations through which an artist or designer arrives somewhere they could not entirely have anticipated at the outset.
I wanted to make that activity visible.
New Media, New Methods, New Work
We gave Volume 1 the subtitle New Media, New Methods, New Work.
The sequence was deliberate. New work did not simply appear. It emerged through methods, and methods developed through encounters with materials, technologies, histories and other people.
Textile designers understand this particularly well. A finished textile or product can conceal an extraordinary accumulation of visual and material research: drawing, cutting, folding, stitching, printing, sampling, colour separation, digital manipulation, repetition and experimentation with scale. Yet once the final object enters an exhibition, shop or collection, much of that thinking can disappear from view.
I felt that something important was being lost.
The activity taking place before resolution was not preparatory debris surrounding the real work. It was where much of the invention occurred.
The Geometrics therefore attempted to create a public context for textile practice as a form of research and knowledge production. Exhibition, publication, workshops, talks and collective discussion were different means of opening that process to view.
Geometry as a Shared Language
Geometry provided a particularly useful framework because it crossed disciplinary boundaries so easily.
A grid might become a textile repeat, an architectural structure, a drawing, a film, a stitched construction or a digital animation. Pattern could migrate between analogue and digital processes. Colour could be organised mathematically and experienced emotionally.
I had long been interested in geometric forms as visual building blocks through which more complex psychological and cultural states could be explored. Apparently rational structures could contain considerable instability. Repetition might establish order while simultaneously producing optical movement, interruption and difference.
This was one reason I thought of The Geometrics in relation to musical improvisation.
Improvising musicians share structures, rhythms and conventions without knowing precisely what will happen within them. Individual voices remain distinct, but something emerges through listening and response.
I wondered whether an exhibition could operate similarly.
Rather than asking artists to illustrate a curatorial proposition, Daisy and I brought practices into proximity and allowed relationships between them to become visible. Geometry was the common structure, but each artist approached it through a different material intelligence.
The collective itself became a means of thinking.
Snakeskin
My own work in Volume 1 included Snakeskin, a long silkscreen print and pastel drawing on paper made in 2010.
The work combined the systematic language of repeat with the physical immediacy of pastel. Geometry provided structure, but the drawing did not behave like a perfectly regulated design. Colour, touch and variation disturbed the system.
Looking at Snakeskin now, I can see questions that continued into later works. What happens when a repeated structure becomes painterly? How can an image move between drawing and design without belonging completely to either? At what point does a pattern cease to function as decoration and begin to establish its own psychological or spatial presence?
These were questions I was asking through my own paintings, but The Geometrics allowed me to examine them collectively.
Curating What Was Missing
There was also a practical reason for creating these exhibitions ourselves.
I wanted this work to be seen.
Moving away from academia and towards a more publicly visible artistic practice made me increasingly aware that the contexts I wanted did not necessarily already exist. Rather than waiting for an institution to define the field or provide an exhibition, Daisy and I created one.
I no longer see that simply as a solution to the problem of getting work shown.
Curating became another part of my practice because it allowed me to ask questions that could not be answered by my own artwork alone. If I wanted to understand what contemporary textile-trained artists were doing with geometry, digital technology, moving image, sculpture, stitching, print and installation, the most interesting response was to bring those practices together and look.
The exhibition became a form of enquiry.
It also allowed me to challenge an assumption that still concerns me: that textile practice is best understood through its resolved outcomes. Textile designers are frequently encountered through the fabric, garment, furnishing or object that finally emerges, rather than through the experimental processes by which they break new ground.
I wanted to turn the process inside out.
The drawings, samples, experiments, conversations, interdisciplinary techniques and material investigations were not peripheral to the work. They were evidence of thinking taking place through making.
From Slow Textiles Group to Textiles Hub London
Seen retrospectively, The Geometrics occupies an important position between the Slow Textiles Group and what became Textiles Hub London.
The Slow Textiles Group had already provided a framework for dialogue, teaching, experimentation and collective activity. The Geometrics pushed those ideas further into exhibition-making, publishing and curatorial research.
The project was not simply about promoting individual practitioners. It was about constructing an ecology in which practices could develop in relation to one another and in which the knowledge embedded in making could become publicly legible.
That principle subsequently became fundamental to Textiles Hub London.
Artists and designers did not arrive simply to present polished outcomes. Work developed through proximity: conversations, workshops, demonstrations, research, material experimentation and informal exchanges between people with very different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds.
What mattered was not only what someone had made, but how their thinking might change through making alongside other people.
Works in Continuance
Looking back at The Geometrics from the perspective of Works in Continuance, I can see that its significance extends beyond the exhibitions themselves.
Artists met one another. Methods were exchanged. Publications recorded practices. Workshops generated further experiments. Curatorial relationships developed. Ideas moved into teaching and returned to individual studios in altered forms.
Some connections became immediately visible; others took years to reveal their significance.
This is increasingly how I understand my own artistic development: not as a sequence of replacements, but as an accumulation of materials, techniques, encounters, places, relationships and histories that remain capable of being reactivated.
The Geometrics made that accumulation collective.
It created a temporary space in which different practices could be unfinished together.
Perhaps that is what I was trying to make visible all along: not simply textile design as a category of objects, but making as a form of thought.
Exhibition
The Geometrics: Volume 1 — New Media, New Methods, New Work
Kingsgate Gallery, London
2013
Co-curated by Emma Neuberg and Daisy McMullan.
Featuring work by artists and designers including Camille Walala, Melanie Bowles, Ele Carpenter, Bridget Harvey, Tanvi Kant, Katherine May, Marie Molterer, Marie O’Connor, Emma Neuberg and Clare Willard.
The exhibition was accompanied by a publication and public programme exploring geometry, material practice and contemporary approaches to textile design.
Pictured: Snakeskin, 2010
Emma Neuberg
Silkscreen print and pastel on paper
66 × 180 cm
Further information: The Geometrics: Volume 1