Celebrating Sheffield Design Week, through Yorkshire Year of the Textile
Learn to finger-knit at this drop-in creative workshop, and help create a new community canopy with artist Elizabeth Gaston. You’ll create vibrant lengths of knitted fabric using a variety of different yarns, which will then be interlooped together into a stunning canopy, to be installed on the University of Leeds campus. During the workshop, poet Rommi Smith will take inspiration from the history of design in Sheffield. Participants will have the opportunity to contribute to the creation of a new poem, responding both to the experience of the workshop and to the creation of this unique knitted sculpture.
No need to book, just turn up on the day. The workshop will take place in Site Gallery’s common room.
A citywide celebration of design in all its forms, Sheffield Design Week is a collaborative platform aiming to increase awareness and appreciation of design and develop new audiences. It offers both cultural and commercial opportunities, showcasing established and emerging design talent and innovative projects. The theme for Sheffield Design Week 2016 is Design City, and will see a broad and varied range of design activity taking place in venues, spaces and places.
Dr Elizabeth Gaston is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Design, University of Leeds. She specialises in knitted fabric and garment design, and is responsible for the design and implementation of the Structured Textiles pathway within the Textile Design Programme. Her exhibition, Crafted Futures, responds to Benjamin Gott’s 200-year- old Dyehouse Pattern book and is currently on display at Leeds Industrial Museum at Armley Mills until the 27 th November.
Rommi Smith is a poet and playwright, and she has held many prestigious residencies including as the first Parliamentary Writer in Residence in British history, and the Inaugural Poet in Residence at Keats’ House, London. As part of the Yorkshire Year of the Textile programme, Rommi is creating an intervention to celebrate the history of Crimpolene in Harrogate in November, focusing on a blue Choral Society dress from 1970.
The Yorkshire Year of the Textile programme is funded by the Arts Council and initiated through the Cultural Institute at the University of Leeds. Inspired by Yorkshire’s rich textile heritage, the project focuses on creativity, innovation and new research and features textile and public art interventions, literary and performance strands with textiles as their theme, and events aimed at all ages and open to all.