Narrative Textiles review by Cas Holmes
Narrative Textiles: Tell your story in mixed media and stitch is the first book by textile artist Ailish Henderson. It’s a gorgeous book in which she explains her working methods and how you can harness them in your own work to create unique, deeply personal textile art pieces. Cas Holmes, textile artists and Batsford author reviews the book.
by Cas Holmes
Like all good stories, Narrative Textiles begins with ‘Once Upon a Time’ as Ailish Henderson welcomes you into her life in which stitch plays a central role and invites you to embroider your own tales. Ailish was taught to embrace the world through her beloved mother who home-schooled her. Her father, she says, ‘taught her to feel’.
Her recording of that world began with pen and paint. It was through her mother and her grandmothers, that she began to embrace the world of cloth. This book sits somewhere in between.
In the first chapter, Processes in Motion, Ailish discusses how ideas can be developed through our visual recording and notation as well as evolve from a place of imagination.
The foundations are laid with the relevance of ‘story-boards’ in the construction of your narrative and establishing what is of interest to you. Underpinning this is the need to embrace the ‘S-Word’ or sketchbooks as part of that recording process.
The following chapter, Materials, explores how we connect to textiles through surprise finds and discoveries, via family heirlooms or through their historical legacy. As part of that connection you are invited to explore both the visual and haptic qualities to be found in cloth, paper and found materials beneath your fingers.
Print, collage, stitch and working sculpturally are made accessible in the mini-projects laid out in the third chapter ‘Making Actions’. All can be explored in the domestic setting without specialist studio equipment.
Ailish talks about ‘mash-up moments’, remembering the joy she found in making things as a child, instinctively working with collage, mixed-media and stitch as a means to discover new ways of working and keeping hold of the passion. The narrative line, Ailish argues, is there to be bent to your will. Using examples of her stories, which she describes as ‘a glorious mix of the fabricated, the frivolous and the true’ she takes you on a journey of text and image to find the narratives that are meaningful to you.
As we follow the path of the story, we walk towards nature and the idea of repair, and how both can be restorative for our ‘souls’…and I should know.
Beautifully illustrated throughout, Narrative Textiles balances drawing, recording and creating works in cloth alongside Ailish’s own poetry and creative observations. Images and text seamlessly weave the work by internationally recognised makers including Woo Jin Joo- winner of the Fine Art Textiles Prize, Michelle Kingdom, Jenni Dutton and Daisy May Collingridge into narratives contained within.
Like all good stories that have a beginning, we come to the end, but as Ailish suggests, there is still so much ‘unwritten’ and it is here she invites you to create a chapter of your own making.
Narrative Textiles: Tell your story in mixed media and stitch by Ailish Henderson is available here on our website and from other good booksellers.
Cas Holmes is the author of several books by Batsford including Soulful Stitch: Finding creativity in crisis, co-authored by Deena Beverley, out now.
Artworks by Ailish Henderson, photographed by Ailish Henderson and Katie Vandyck.
