Reimagining lace: investigating the dynamics of space as an ephemeral marking of (P)lace
Creators: name: Heffer, Cecilia
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330315
subject: Textile and fashion design

description: Over the last 20 years, engagement with lace as a contemporary design source has opened a new space for designers to explore unconventional approaches to traditional technologies and materials. Lace has been reinterpreted in innovative ways through the creation of objects, installations and artworks, exploring a variety of themes through its unique pattern and structural properties. A contemporary lace movement has emerged, as evidenced by key national and international exhibitions, including Radical Lace (McFadden 2008), Lost in Lace (Millar 2011), Love Lace (Ward 2011,) Lace Unarchived (Briggs-Goode 2018) and initiatives (workshops, symposia) such as the Doily Free Zone  (DFZ), an online initiative led by lace expert Dr Angharad Rixon. Reimagining Lace is situated in this relatively new community to explore and communicate new expressions and aesthetic opportunities for a contemporary lace-making practice through analogue and digital technologies.

Reimagining Lace differentiates itself in the field as it involved the development of a unique material innovation that combined print and constructed textiles that are themselves rarely seen together in lace-making, let alone in the process applied. The lace departed from the traditional structures and patterns or motifs found in bobbin and needle lace and was constructed through repetitive machine-stitching onto a soluble substrate. This allowed digital printing and photographic imagery to be imprinted onto the surface of the lace, extending its material language into new terrain. The practice thus traversed the space between textile, craft and visual art, and the resulting contemporary lace works were regularly exhibited as large-scale installations in various museum and gallery spaces. In this way, they challenged traditional perceptions of lace by placing it in a different context away from its usual associations with fashion, interior and domestic craft. This PhD research was motivated by questions raised over time during an established practice, first, by the consistent interest of a gallery audience in the making process that went into the creation of the lace and, second, through questions that emerged during cross-disciplinary collaboration that explored lace through interactive digital technologies.

The aim of this PhD research was consequently to demonstrate how lace is more than a novel technique and rather an intellectual investigation into the configuration of space, that the cognitive imagination in realising a lace has unique implications for cross-disciplinary research and innovative research outcomes. This opened a new direction for Reimagining Lace to enter an emergent community of practice exploring what it means to craft textiles in a digital age. The study responded to current concerns in the field regarding the many new ways in which virtual digital surfaces can imitate and replace physical textiles. The increase of virtual surfaces potentially runs the risk of losing the tacit knowledge inherent in a textile and the natural human connection with how materials are made. The study saw value in demonstrating how lace is a unique material system for thinking about textiles, that its unique spatiality can contribute to emergent material research exploring innovation at the intersection between the analogue and the digital. Moreover, it showed that the digital need not replace a material practice; rather, it enhances the intricate dynamic relationships that go into the making of contemporary lace.

To demonstrate the cognitive processes involved in giving material form to the ephemeral observed in the world around me, I explored the ethereal qualities of lace as a metaphor for transience. The study adopted a theoretical framework to communicate and explore methods that make up a unique lace-making process through a series of practice-based projects that analysed key components that make up a lace. Agency was given to the potential and meaning held in the spaces in between a lace as an ephemeral (p)lace marker. The research projects were framed around observations made and materials collected in both the natural and built environments. A series of walking expeditions provided the opportunity to stop, notice, photograph, collect and transform materials into a contemporary expression of (p)lace in keeping with the technologies and fluidity of our times. The practice-based nature of these projects revealed new insights and unexpected research outcomes that would not have been possible through other modes of inquiry.

The research responded to a paradigm shift taking place, one that recognises new ways of writing about textiles as a valid contribution to material research in its own right. As a result, artists and designers are encouraged to make known the tacit knowledge embedded within their making practice. Reimagining Lace addresses a knowledge gap where accounts of lace-making have been conducted mainly through a historical or technical viewpoint and where little in-depth reflective critique on contemporary lace-making through practice in the field exists. This study thus aimed to provide an extensive critique on and through the thinking and making methodologies that underpin a unique lace-making process. The objective was to present new ways of thinking about and imagining what a contemporary lace can do and be in a digital age.

The research is significant because it contributes to the evolution of lace in a contemporary time by reviewing lace in new digital environments; the projects transform the way we think about and experience lace in keeping with the digital age. This PhD inquiry advocates for lace to be understood as a living cultural and material resource for future design practice, textile, cross-disciplinary research and teaching. The contribution to knowledge in this research consists of novel analogue and digital lace outcomes supported by a reflective critique of the assertions and discoveries made through each project. In addition, the theoretical framing and methods adopted in this research equipped me to share the making of a contemporary lace as an expanded practice that has implications well beyond the discipline of textiles in general and lace-making in particular.