Solace In Gossamer
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Solace In Gossamer
December 2025This project was about reviving traditional crafts and reclaiming the gentleness and slow labour in a way that subverts it's connotations, showing how textiles can be powerful and that craft does belong in contemporary settings. This series was made on the knit machine using natural silk and banana fibres to create a more authentic representation of cobwebs. These symbolise how a spider's motherly instinct to repair their webs reflect domestic crafting values.
The title is in reference to the comfort textiles and crafting communities create, providing 'solace' (also a play on words as it includes 'lace' as I explored in my samples). And I chose the term gossamer instead of cobwebs as I believe it does their beauty justice, reframing how cobwebs can be seen as a burden and instead presenting them in a way that highlights the spider's hard work - a testimony of patience and skill. This allowed me to reflect on the haptic relationship between me and my materials, and encouraged me to work more intuitively.
Series of machine-knitted cobwebs hand stitched together accompanied by 3x A3 prints of close up images including bobbin lace & machine knit work
The spider as the weaver of the web is an artist in their own way, leading me to the decision not to include any spiders on mine as if I myself were the spider of this work. This closely ties into the children's novel 'The Snow Spider' which led a lot of my supporting work for this project, a book where I share the name of the character of the snow spider - Arianwen, meaning 'white silver'. The lack of colour throughout this project has helped me focus in on textures and patterns, encouraging me to explore different ways of manipulating the aesthetic just through fibre arts.
I used lights as part of the curation as I found the white threads blended in against the wall, but I didn't want to add a black background as I wanted them to appear as they do naturally in the corners of spaces. The shadows casted on the wall help scale the pieces up even more, and emphasise the patterns created from the knit work. The webs themselves become almost invisible with the darker silhouettes becoming the main focus of the work despite not being able to touch them, similar to the subtleties of craft and it's position in the art world. This was an interesting observation on tactility and how the language of textiles are perceived.
The series of prints explores scaling up intricate work with ought loosing their delicacy, showing how different mediums can still reflect the tactility of the work despite not being able to feel the texture. The close-ups show the stitches from a different perspective, highlighting the handmade look and emphasising the authenticity evident in the slight "mistakes", refraining them as a crucial part of the learning process.
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