Why Slow? Why now?

Why Slow? Why now?

1 Definitions of Slow

2 Why I set up the Slow Textiles Group

3 A Personal Story - On Slow, Looping, Creative Dialogues

that span Fine Art and Textiles.

4 What slowtextiles.org can do for you

Dr Emma Neuberg,
Why Slow? Why Now?
Slow Textiles Conference,
Stroud International Textiles Festival, May 8th & 9th 2010.

www.slowtextiles.org
©2010 Dr Emma Neuberg. All rights reserved.
The term ‘Slow’ originates from the Slow
Food movement:
Founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986,
Slow Food links pleasure and food
with awareness and responsibility.

“It seeks to defend biodiversity in our food supply,

by opposing the standardisation of taste,

defending the need for consumer information and

protecting cultural identities tied to food.”

Kate Fletcher
Applied to textiles, it is about many things:
Practice, people, care, character, regionality, taking time, sharing,
being mindful, considering ecosystems, interdependence,
complementary paces, complementary practices, taking responsibility,
maturity, maturing, timelines, inheritance, hierlooms, love, relational being,
relational activity, emotional intelligence, gaining insight,
processing thought, wisdom,
passing on, spirituality, evolution, knowledge, cultural styles,
cultural particularities, local geology, trade, the resources that are available,
wealth, yield, joy, sadness, containment, loss, transformation of loss,
transformation of being, happiness, reverie, occupation, purpose,
need, neurosis, depression, contemplation, group support,
group endeavour, family projects, an opportunity for conversation,
well-being, fidgety fingers, calmness, integration, making time for reflection,
talent, skill, story-telling, gifts and giving, inspiration, creativity, artisanship,
craft, cultural exchange, enjoyment of others,
learning about others, varying paces…
It is also about :

•Continuously changing fashion seasons

(at least 16 each year).

•A reduction in garment prices by 25% in recent years. Evidence of

‘creative destruction’
•A 40% increase in purchases over the last decade. (Joseph
Schumpter).
•A growing laundering time and energy burden.

•A growing pile of cheap clothes that the charity shops cannot sell.

•The purchase of two million tonnes of cheap clothing each year.

•The placing of two million tonnes of textiles in landfill each year!

And that’s just the UK.

 And the corresponding supply chains:
•How these affect the environment.

•How these consume energy and resources.

•What they leave in their trail.

•How these affect communities health -

physical and mental: ‘the race to
The Aral Sea in 1989 and 2003.
the bottom’ effect (see Fletcher).

•How these put pressure on local ecological systems.

•How these exacerbate the rich/poor divide.

•How female workers are treated where no regulation or respect for

regulation is in place…(the best place to research these critical aspects of Fast
Fashion is the Ethical Fashion Forum).
 And the corresponding communication
machine:
•How it affects our environment.

•How it consumes energy and resources

(one billboard consumes 387, 485 kWh
per year) .

•How it contributes to visual and mental

Shibuya Square,
pollution (we see over 1 million ads a year).
Tokyo, 2008.

•How it affects our ability to think and reflect.

•How it fills and speeds up time - see Jencks’ linear model of our modern era
that focuses on sequential and progressive culture resulting in feelings of time
compression.

•How this affects our relating to ourselves, our minds and our bodies.

•How we relate to each other and to objects.

So, Slow is framed in Fast:

While Fast is prominent - its thinking and consequences - the need for
Slow rises. The effects of Fast are passed on.
Where Fast dominates,

“..monocultures concentrate impacts in specific agricultural and

manufacturing sectors to increase ecological risk, to make the sector

less resilient to changing global conditions

in both business and the environment

and to reduce consumer choice.”

Kate Fletcher.
 Less equal societies = statistics on earlier death from Tim Jackson.

Blind behaviours are not sustainable:

Fast Fashion adverts tell it how it is.

Fast lifestyles lead to neurosis, illness, unhappiness, dependency,

destructiveness and shortened life. This is because Fast does not foster
trust, connectedness, care, recognition, responsibility, mourning,
gratitude, renunciation and generosity. Its underlying system is based on lining
a few pockets, power and a monoculture methodology.
The image-
makers show us,
paradoxically,
what is
going on:

What Fast tells us:

How we treat our environment, how we treat each other,

how we treat ourselves, our insatiable appetite, greed, lack of respect,
not knowing when or being able to say enough,
the prioritising of the individual, the prioritising of individual wealth,
our selfishness, blindness, lack of insight, helplessness, anxiety,
destructive behaviour, denial, lack of boundaries,
divisive thinking, pride, shame, inability to galvanise change together…
What it says, deeply, about us:
Theoretical perspectives on greed:

‘something damaged, something lost.’

Desire and lack (Lacan)

Infantile greed and envy (Klein)
Grenvy (Coltart)
Denial of death (Becker, Brown)
Institutionalized greed ( Long)
Gaia (Lovelock)
The Anti-Group (Nitsun)

On the insatiable desire for more:

‘At the dark heart of the anti-group is the dread of insufficiency and
beyond that, of extinction.’

Morris Nitsun
Fast renders us consumers not
producers, no longer able to sew or see:

It is through the hands that we begin to see.

Consuming without producing fosters
alienation
and
neurosis:

Christopher Lasch, US social critic describes the resultant

social phenomenon, the performing self:

“To the performing self, the only reality is the identity he can construct out
of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular
film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural tradition
in order to perfect the part he has devised.
The new Narcissus gazes at his own reflection, not so much in admiration
as in unremitting search of flaws.”
 Why Slow? Why now?
2 Why I set up the Slow Textiles Group:

(i) Practical

(ii) Symbolic

(iii) Sustainable

(iv) Immaterial
 (i) Practical (and personal):
1 For fifteen years I didn’t manage to get the
teaching post that I longed for.

2 For ten years I didn’t manage to get the

research post that I dreamed of.

3 There was no platform for an interdisciplinary approach to

textiles and material processes.

4 No academic department was interested in connecting

practice, technique, history, psychology, semiotics, well-
being theory and intellectual development in the training of
their design students - I hounded the RCA and the
University of the Arts for years!
5 No platform existed to explore these connections and
dialogues and relate them to sustainability, sustainable
practice and design.

6 No platform existed for connecting textile landfill deterrents

with extended life textile technique training for every
household.

7 In amongst all the trendy craft classes not one was

integrating the history of design with thematic possibilities for
extended life techniques with the well-being benefits of
being in the group and the links with nurturing cultural
capital, mental capital, social capital and resource capital.

8 No one could see the potential of all of the above and its
potential for enabling others and encouraging
entrepreneurship.
9 No one could see the potential of all of the above and its
scope for saving government money - relating to social
policy, health benefits and waste management policy - and
empowering others to make money (by passing on their new
skills, making garments and other textile products from
waste textiles and selling work, independently and through
the group).

So, I did it myself!

 (ii) Symbolic:
1 If there is no space for something - real and symbolic - then it
does not happen. Making a platform for Slow Textiles allows
people, purpose and ideas to form and grow.

1 ‘Design for the world you would like to see,’ says John
Thackara.

2 Design like a musician - give, share and improvise together.

3 Address the designer’s misguided legacy: being guarded,

egotistic and closed.

4 Closed designers get lonely, lose confidence, work

unconsciously, copy others, contribute to homogeneity and
landfill and get designer’s block. Viva the stimulation and
support of the group!
 (iii) Sustainable:
1 By 2015, no textile will be allowed into landfill, across
Europe!

(i) Where might people, designers and ‘professional amateurs’

learn, share, talk, discuss, show and develop ideas in
anticipation of this?

(ii) With the exception of Becky Earley, which tutors were

addressing this - in schools, Further and Higher Education?

2 Which textile groups were addressing waste management

strategies to,

(i) contain and help remediate the negative environmental effects

of waste generation;

(ii) disrupt some the linear flow of materials through the industrial system?
3 Which textile groups were addressing strategies to,

(i) repair and recondition either whole products or parts of products

to keep them useful as long as possible;

(ii) re-use products, normally for the same purpose, sometimes with
redistribution and resale;

(iii) recycle raw materials to provide inputs to the manufacture of

other goods?
4 Which textile groups were addressing ‘mollification’?

“Formula fashion and formula consumer experiences may be easy to

manufacture for brands and retailers, but their effect is to

mollify

consumers and limit expectations.

The products on sale in our high streets are becoming homogenous and

this lack of choice erodes our individuality and dulls our imagination,

limiting our confidence about what clothes can be.”

Fletcher.
5 Which textile groups were addressing creative paralysis?

“Not only does the homogeneity of the high street have a pacifying effect on us as
consumers, suppressing our expectations and stifling our questions, but the
products themselves are presented to us as complete or ‘closed’ with an almost
untouchable or sacrosanct status.
This dissuades us from personalizing them in order to
make them our own. It makes us wary of cutting off a collar, ripping out a lining or
tucking a waistband.

Users ‘follow’ the trends prescribed by the industry elite and become increasingly
distanced from the creative practices surrounding their clothes.”

This marks a significant cultural shift.

“The result is de-skilled and ever more inactive individuals who feel both
unrepresented by the fashion system and unable to do anything about it.

The system and the clothes that represent it, appear to undermine our self-esteem and
yet we lack the knowledge and confidence to make, adapt and
personalize fashion pieces ourselves.

Left to Consume, Von Busch and Fletcher, p.186.

6 Which textile groups were addressing the cultural myths
in order to define a sustainable methodology for
rethinking textiles and textile waste?

“A new fashion starts from rejection of the old and, often,

an eager embracing of what was previously considered ugly;

it therefore subtly undercuts its own assertion that the latest thing is

somehow the final solution to the problem of how to look…”

Elizabeth Wilson,
Adorned in Dreams.
7 Who was addressing the social and mental potential in their
textiles practice remit?

In the UK, by 2071 there will be 21.3 million people over the age of 65;
what provision is being developed and road-tested for engaging those
people with accessible, easy, yield-generating and intelligent skills?

8 Which textile body was addressing well-being in their practice

remit?

‘A range of skills and behaviours is crucial in empowering people to

develop and maintain their mental capital and well-being. These include
executive function skills, an eagerness to learn, train and retrain,
throughout life, the resilience to cope with stress and life events and
behaviours that can promote a healthy lifestyle and protect against decline
in old age..

According to the experts, this means placing mental capital and well-being
at the heart of policy-making.’ (Govt Office for Science).
(iv) Immaterial:
1 I needed a place to give and share my skills.

2 As designers and thinkers one has so much to give, but

London colleges want names or people with a history of
funding.

3 Whilst doing a PhD, I was told to treat and identify my

mistakes as equal to successes, so I learnt to look for what
what was absent, lacking or missing:

Increasing..

unemployment, mental health-related problems, Loneliness

Index, older population, closures in Adult Education, craft
classes without discursive theoretical framework and
ownership hang-ups (IP) with designers.
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing
existing situations into preferred ones.”

Herb Simon in Kate Fletcher.

 Why Slow? Why now?

3 A Personal Story - On Slow, Looping, Creative Dialogues

that span Fine Art and Textiles.

Georges Braque, c.1937. EQ Nicholson, Black Goose, c.1935.

On slow, very personal dialogues:
1 I come from an unconventional family.

2 It is so unconventional that is has created pockets of psychological difficulty within

the family.

3 It is because of this that I have taken an active interest in psychoanalytic theory:

how people behave, the way they think and consequences of the two.

4 It is through this that I have learnt about what is passed on, projected, internalised
and communicated. And, increasingly, I apply these insights and lines of enquiries
to art and
visual practice.

Tim Nicholson, Jug, 1999. Emma Neuberg, Me, Mother, 2010.

Of interest, in an artistic family, are the visual conversations that get passed
along, flowing and ricocheting:

Tim Nicholson, Jug & Cow, EQ Nicholson, The Black Jug, 1946.
2001.

EQ Nicholson, Jug & Glass Mug, Ben Nicholson, Still life, 1934-6.
hooked wool rug, 1987.
 Motifs reappear and echo each other over time and one starts to see
the manifestation of continuing emblems, dynamics, figures, structures and
dialogues.

Tim Nicholson, Owl,

1992.

Winifred Nicholson, Owl,

rag rug, 1948.

Ben Nicholson, Still life, c.1940. William Nicholson, 1946.

Ben Nicholson and his second wife, Barbara Hepworth, put their fine art
motifs into modernist textiles:

Barbara Hepworth, Edinburgh

Ben Nicholson, Three Circles,
Weavers, c.1936.
Edinburgh Weavers, c.1936.
 Overlapping conversations take place across the
surrounding community too, so that seemingly different
groups and previous generations ripple and influence. The
dividing of the canvas, the patterns, speckles, lines and
subjective perspectives between Dorn and EQ:

EQ Nicholson, View Through a Window, 1946.

Marion Dorn, Wilton Royal, 1932.
EQ Nicholson worked for Marion Dorn in the early 1930s and was influenced
by the trend for batiks and block-printing (for the textile researcher, lots here!).
Marion Dorn met Picasso, Braque, Leger, Dufy and Delaunay
in the 1920s. And her husband, Edward Kauffer, worked at the
Omega Workshops.

Dorn, Edinburgh Weavers, 1935. Marion Dorn, Warner & Sons, 1935.

Delaunay, c.1932. Fernand Leger, 1909.

 Ben Nicholson was also influenced by Braque:
the multiple perspectives, the division of form and their
simultaneous shifts in feeling, vibrancy and observation.

Ben Nicholson, c.1930. Ben Nicholson, Slinky, Delaunay textiles, c.1930.

hooked wool rug, 1933.
 In turn, Delaunay was influenced by Chevreul (author of the
paradigm shifting The Laws of Simultaneous Colour
Contrasts). And when I learnt that he was Head of Dyeing
at the Gobelins Tapestry Factory in 1824, the loops
seemed to flow (straight into textiles).

Delaunay textiles, c.1912.

The Gobelins, 1443.
Manufacture des Gobelins,
Paris, 2010:

Textile traces, the unspoken dialogues..

The artisan’s relationship with place. How internal and external
landscapes meet and where they meet, art and artefact are
created:

Ben Nicholson, Higher EQ Nicholson, Emma Neuberg,

Constabba Farm, 1944. Boveridge, 1950. Boveridge, 2009.

Louisa Creed, Boveridge, 2009. Tim Nicholson, Boveridge, 1992.

My own landscapes carry me in them - what I call my multi-
perspectives:

Emma Neuberg,
Lens,
triptych, pastel and silk screen print on paper, 120 x 65cm, 2008.
These multi-perspectives are applied both representationally
and abstractly:

Natasha’s Lilies, Looking Outside In, Crushing Fever,

65 x 43cm, 2007. 65 x 43cm, 2009. 65 x 43cm, 2010.
 Translating these into textiles represents the on-going work,
the slow processes:

Camelia, 2009.

Momentoes of Love, 2007.

Sketchbook work:
So, here is my ‘question’:
I used to make multiples but now each piece integrates multi-perspectives
within it. Do these correspond with the two ‘time frames’ that Fletcher talks
about…?

The Making of a Picture, 2010.

Multiples:
Blossom Capes, 2006-8.
Views on speed:
“The ancient Greeks talked of two different kinds of time, kairos (opportunity and
propitous moment), and chronos (eternal and ongoing time)…

Stewart Brand
proposes that any resilient human civilisation needs similar layers of fast and slow
activity to balance each other.”

“The challenge of sustainability is to connect the fashion and textiles industry

with multiple layers of human activity.”

As quoted by Kate Fletcher

(As you may imagine, I have the answer to these questions, but it will take another
conference to unpack!)
Slow dialogues where the artist is in the
work:
 Why Slow? Why now?

4 What slowtextiles.org can do for you

• Meet whenever you want - monthly or more;

• Bring work, share stories, upcycle;

• Learn new techniques;

• Gain new insights;

• Exhibition and publication opportunities..at the Slow Textiles Gallery, at

the Materials Action exhibition and at the V&A..

• Workshops lead to funded projects and exhibitions; this is happening

with our Carpenter’s Happiness workshop and the Photography in Stitch
workshop;

• Be central to addressing the 2015 no textiles in landfill discussion and

process;

• Act as a waste management strategy and encourage pockets of

entrepreneurship around that;
• Be linked to our affiliated cultural centres to attend workshops with me or
others. Next year, workshops start in the heart of the ancient Greek
capital, Nafplio - in traditional embroidery workshops.

• Structure and tutorials for those outside of education.

• Foster new networks and conversations.

• Download all our workshop techniques for free.

• Enable and upskill yourself and others: one of our members went to
Uganda to upskill communities there and help set up routes to retail
using the Slow Textile Techniques Extended Life methods.

• Be part of the reflexive fashion system, a group of enablers that help put
into place a zero waste textile system.

• Coming up…Omega Workshop days, Reconstruct Your Favourite

Garment, Designs Inspired by the Ballets Russes for Your Old Textiles,
New Theory workshops and the V&A Slow/Fast workshops..
The aim of Waste Management strategies:

“Eliminating waste is a core concept of ecosystem inspired design

approaches like permaculture and industrial ecology where everything is
recycled and all waste from one component becomes ‘food’ for another.
Here what appears to be waste is actually exchange.

Exchange is a liberating idea; it helps emphasize collaboration,

interconnectedness, cycles and forward planning and offers opportunity for
checks, balances and feedback…cyclical economies and zero waste…”

Fletcher.
 Thank you.

www.slowtextiles.blogspot.com