Journeys with Silk in Macclesfield
Last month been I hosted a collaborative community project in Macclesfield as part of my MA Fine Art with Falmouth University.
Titled Journey to Here: More than one Silk Road, the project explored personal journeys and Macclesfield’s rich silk heritage through a series of creative workshops at The Wellbeing Space.
The location felt deeply significant. The Wellbeing Space was once a silk mill, and Macclesfield itself is often described as the “end of the Silk Road”. At the height of the town’s silk industry, there were 70+ mills here, so bringing people together in this former industrial building added another layer of meaning to the work.
Each workshop began with a soundscape I created with sounds from the silk industry. Participants were invited to hold a square of silk while listening to sounds connected to sericulture, silk production, the Silk Road and Macclesfield. I wanted this to be a way of "tuning in" to silk as a material, but also a "place" to hold ideas, stories and multiple meanings.
From there, participants were invited into reflective writing, expressive painting, silk collage and finally a shared painting on a long length of Habutai silk. Each person contributed a continuous ink mark representing their own “journey to here”. The same silk was used across both workshops, gradually becoming a record of many different lives, routes and experiences overlapping in one place.
After each workshop I stretched the silk from the collaborative paintings and created Silk Road Journeys 1 & 2 (below), currently hanging in the big room at The Wellbeing Space. I also created two response works after each workshop: Silk Response 1 & 2 (above) using silk remnants and offcuts from the workshops and collaborative paintings.
The pieces will come down in a few weeks, but then will also be on display again during Macclesfield Textile Week, 19-27th September, at Christ Church in Macclesfield - along with some other new silk stretched paintings. I'll also be hosting a version of the workshop at the Silk Museum classroom on 19th September. Sign up for more information via my mailing list.
Silk has become central to my MA Fine Art research and creative practice - and I'm currently in the early stages of planning my Final Major Project, which will be a site-specific exhibition at a venue in Macclesfield in November. To be the first to find out how you can visit - get on my mailing list!
