This post was written by Bailee Wray, a second-year Forensic Psychology student who is currently working as a Student Researcher in collaboration with Dr. Vicki Pugh, co-lead of the Living Lab Project. Bailee is passionate about craft and sustainability and wants to help more people get involved in Craftivism.
About the workshop:
Earlier this year, I (Bailee) attended a beginners’ weaving workshop hosted by Fine Art master’s students Tom Hardwick and Adrian Westgarth. The workshop was a continuation of a previous ‘Living Lab Repair Fair’ event, which occurred in November 2024 (Read about it on BBC News). During the Repair Fair, Adrian held a stall and experimented with making a YSJ Community Quilt. This is a collaborative art project which aims to encourage mindfulness and form a sense of community and resilience for the participants.
Workshop attendees learning how to weave.
Why weaving?
“The weaving workshop was in conjunction with the Community Quilt, however it became more of a stand-alone workshop than the others we’re planning at the moment. It came as a result of the Repair Fair, in response to the number of sign-ups and interest in attending skills-based workshops we gauged on the day. We chose weaving as Tom Hardwick (my friend on the MFA course) has been making some really interesting work on the intersection of fibre-art, digital practices and data storage.
Specifically, Tom has also been thinking about the environmental impact of data storage within their woven work. Therefore, we thought that a weaving workshop led by Tom for the Community Quilt would create a space to discuss this. This was the first open workshop we’ve run, although we do have some more workshops currently being planned. This includes a Natural dyeing workshop coming up in the next month (date TBD), during which we’ll be naturally dyeing the fabric for the Community Quilt backing itself.”
– Adrian Westgarth.
Weaving and Activism:
Sitting at the intersection of fibre-art and computation, Tom’s practice addresses the impact of digital technology on human systems of knowledge, with a focus on the archive as a site of cultural and personal memory. Drawing on the visual and tactile language of textiles, their work presents the digital world as a concrete and tangible environment, aiming to expose the workings of digital memory and question the supposed superiority of this mode of documentation.
Recently, one of Tom’s projects was shown at Cardiff’s Umbrella Art Collective in an exhibition called ‘Praxis’. The piece, named ‘Our Libraries Will Not Burn, They Will Disappear Without a Trace’, is a set of handwoven tapestries depicting childhood photos. The piece is designed to call attention to the wastefulness and impermanence of digital storage. During the workshop, Tom elaborated on this, talking about how everything in digital storage is just a copy, and will eventually become corrupted or unreadable as digital technology and the way data is stored changes.
Tom Hardwick’s ‘Our Libraries Will Not Burn, They Will Disappear Without a Trace’
Learning how to weave:
We were each told to pick a makeshift weaving loom crafted out of cardboard and yarn, this was to prove that weaving does not require expensive equipment. Tom even showed us that you can use an empty frame to weave by wrapping yarn around it. Once we selected our yarn, we were given wooden lolly sticks that had each been given a small split at one end. We put the yarn into the split to hold it securely and used the other end of the stick to weave between the strands of yarn.
A textured and colourful finished piece from a workshop attendee.
There was a large selection of yarn to choose from. Tom showed us how to begin weaving, explaining that the ‘warp’ is the yarn or string that you have already fixed to the loom, and the ‘weft’ is the yarn that you use to weave between the warp threads. We started off with a plain weave, where you go under the first thread, over the next, and so on. On the next row, you go over the warp threads you went under in the previous row, and under the ones you went over. This creates a crisscross pattern. After this, Tom encouraged us to experiment with different techniques, for instance, going over one and then under two, or using different coloured yarns to create patterns.
My weaving experience:
I began with a plain weave, as it is the easiest to get started with. Then, I experimented by going over and under multiple warp threads at once. This resulted in different textures in my fabric, almost creating a ‘basket weave’ effect. ‘Basket weave’ is similar to a plain weave, except that you use two or more yarns simultaneously, creating a checkerboard effect. I achieved this by going under and over the same warp threads for multiple rows, making sure to anchor my yarn at the end of each row so that it didn’t unravel.
Review of the workshop from Ellie Steel, Community Skills Intern at the ‘Living Lab’:
“Tom and Adrian led a really interesting workshop and discussion. I had never done weaving before, but it was explained simply, and I was able to pick it up quickly! Tom also shared with us their thoughts and research on data storage, which is something I hadn’t previously considered the significance of: saving thousands of photos to the “cloud” doesn’t mean they just disappear, they’re just being saved to a bigger computer elsewhere, and are using up a huge amount of energy. When it comes down to it, how many of those photos and documents do we need to store there? Why do we trust it as a location for storing memories and files more than physical methods of documentation? I really loved seeing some of Tom’s personal work of pieces of corrupt or spoiled digital photos.”
– Ellie Steel, Community Skills Intern at the ‘Living Lab’.
Final Reflections:
I thoroughly enjoyed learning how to weave and being involved in crafting as a collective, conversation making process.
My finished piece.
The finished result of my weaving is a colourful, textured piece of fabric that I thoroughly enjoyed creating. I plan to continue weaving and hopefully become better and more adventurous. Most importantly, through conversations made possible through the workshop, my eyes were opened to the wastefulness of data storage. Research shows that 90% of stored data becomes unused after three months. This, in conjunction with the fact that data centres make up 2-3% of the entire world’s energy consumption, is deeply worrying.
My mind went immediately to the hundreds, if not thousands, of photos on my phone that I never look at. I’m not sure exactly what I want to do yet, but I am determined not to contribute to the growing issue of data storage and energy waste.
