Weaving as Archive: Looms, Diaspora and Gendered Threads

Public Event Series – Raisa Kabir, Jess Bailey

15 March 2024
2:00 – 3:30 pm
Part of our public events programme 'Gender and Cloth' convened by Dr Jess Bailey
The Foundling Museum

Join our host Jess Bailey, UCL, and special guest multidisciplinary artist and researcher Raisa Kabir to learn the foundational principles of weaving while exploring the relationship between our bodies and the loom. Drawing on recent exhibitions of her practice such as work included in Cotton: Labour, Land and Body at Crafts Council, Raisa will explore how critical histories, artistic practice and pedagogies of weaving can come together to deepen our engagement with textile art history. She will help us consider weaving itself as an archive of embodied experiences of geographies, gender and diaspora. Participants will work on looms at the Foundling Museum.

This programme is an introduction to the subject and is open to all; BA and MA students are especially encouraged to attend.

This workshop will take place at the Foundling Museum. All making supplies are provided free of charge and workshops are in-person only.

All workshops are wheelchair accessible.

Spaces are limited in order to create intimate discussion and instruction during making sessions; please join the waiting list if registration is full.

About the speakers

Raisa Kabir is an artist based in London, who uses woven textiles, sound, video, and performance to materialise concepts concerning the cultural politics of cloth, labour, and gendered archives. Her practice envisions weaving as an embodied practice that connects us to others, the importance of world-building, and craft knowledge as an epistemology of the global and colonised body. Raisa has exhibited work internationally at The Whitworth, Glasgow International, Liverpool Biennial, CCA Glasgow, Center for Craft Creativity and Design, British Textile Biennial and Whitechapel Gallery. Kabir has lectured on her research at Tate Modern, The Courtauld and the V&A.
Jess Bailey is a lecturer for premodern art in the History of Art Department, University of Edinburgh. Her published research addresses the representation of disability and gendered violence. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, Jess was an associate lecturer in the History of Art Department at University College London where her research on medieval quilting was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship. Passionate about the wider accessibility of art history, Jess organises public art history programming through her projects such as “The People’s Quilting Bee” lectures with curator Sharbreon Plummer and quilt fundraisers for groups including Land in Our Names and True Colors United. She is the author of Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting. She co-founded Within the Frame with quilter and historian Deb McGuire, a practice-based heritage research project for the preservation of hand quilting in a frame.