Esme Curtis-Lundberg’s practice examines the traces of being and doing and is anchored in how materials accumulate residues of our interactions with the physical world. In particular, she examines how textiles collect ephemeral and visceral residues through their permeable fibers. Prints and installations respond to an interest in how toil and craft link people to place through the processing of local materials, from wood and stone, to clay, flax and rush.

From folk ritual to local industry, region specific practices root our hands to materials in a lineal connection to local surroundings. Within a digital age, reconnecting with the physicality of making, offers an antidote to consumerist culture and by exploring these areas, my work presents and re-values some of what has been lost from our rich haptic history.

‘Workers’ Blue and Other Fibres’ assembles a collection of pieces that hold traces of social history, presented through garments, unpickings, rubbings and print.

the affinity between body and cloth is self-evident – we understand the relationship between first and second skin without much explanation

(Solveigh Goett, The Handbook of Textile Culture, 2016.)

Textiles are at the core of everyday life and garments act as a ‘second skin’, gathering creases, stains, wear and tear to become a form of memory archive of daily activity. We have an ingrained relatedness to cloth, as fibre on our skin carries us from swaddling at birth to shroud at death, so we can understand instinctively those that have been before. Prints, rubbings and reimagining’s retrace and represent marks of tactile handling which are often overlooked. Traces, such as loose threads, stains, holes, creases, indents, notches, tarnishes, scratches, and grime, have the ability to speak humbly but honestly about what it is to be human in a material world – they are the record of life.