Table of Contents

List of Plates
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Textile as Making: techne between practice and theory
Weaving the Chapters
(Inter)mingling

Chapter One: Folding
An Unfolding of Making
Metaphorics and Metonymy as Enfolded Modes for Thinking
Textile–Space
La Maison Baroque
Folding–Seaming–Fraying

Chapter Two: Textile as Shimmering Surface
Veils: a space of scintillation
Faintly Gleaming
Illicit Encounters
Absurdity
Through the Looking Glass

Chapter Three: Seaming
Seaming as Passage
Hand & Machine Stitching
Seaming as Suturing
Seaming as Trace
Conjunctions & Crossings

Chapter Four: Textile as Viscous Substance
Attacking the Boundary
Collapsing Boundaries
Flow
Ontological Secretions
A substance between two states

Chapter Five: Fraying
Frayed and Fraying: a politics of translation
Frayed and Fraying Cloth: broken and contingent
To the Edge: pointing away from the centre
Worn Through
Fraying

Chapter Six: Textile as Caressing Subject/Object
Affective Touching
Proximity
Opening Out-Becoming
Measuring Distance
First Actions of Hands
Synoptic-Synesthetic Caressing

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

A Philosophy of Textile brings together the materiality, imagery and language of textile to develop practice-based modes of thinking, making and writing.

About the Author

Catherine Dormor is a practising artist, Reader in Textile Practices and Head of Research Programmes and at the Royal College of Art, London UK.

Reviews

The bibliography is extensive, giving an interesting insight into the metaphorical use of the words that textiles have made to the language.
*Book Threads*

Dormor provides a crucial model of integrated writing about practice that entwines the academic and creative voice. In the face of much writing that adopts linear models not because of their usefulness, but for lack of another model, here the academic and creative voice finally hold “theory” and “practice” as one.
*Jessica Hemmings, National College of Art & Design, Dublin, Ireland*