Thread {}
A New Generative Textile Collaboration
Vicky Clarke, Sally Gilford, Cheryl O’Meara

Really excited to be working on this new collaborative project with Sally and Cheryl and pushing myself into the area of generative visuals and coding through Processing. Below is an intro to our collective and method and our first commission for Manchester International Festival, a response to Jeremy Deller’s What is the City but the People.

Introducing  >Thread {}

About: > Thread { } is a coding term referencing the digital part of our work, it also represents the physical material and cultural textile heritage of Manchester and The Archive. Thread is a metaphor for the weaving of digital, analogue and historical processes and critiques the disposability of consumerist mass manufacturing through interdisciplinary personalised artworks and products.

Our Process: Digital imagery generated from human bio data – code infused with numerical personal narratives using Processing – imagery translated into hand screen printed designs – screen prints translated into digital print illustrations – personalised textiles digitally printed and made into artwork/installations/products/

Who we are: >Thread {} brings together the experience and creativity of; Cheryl O’Meara who has an archive of over 50,000 antique textile and wallpaper swatches housed at Islington Mill, Salford. Highly successful as a commercial print designer her ambition is to push the paradigms and boundaries of what fashion and print are and reinvent a new future for fashion, print and self-expression. Sally Gilford is an established artist, print maker and creative practitioner who works with leading establishments such as the Whitworth, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Arts Council Collection. She is currently working on ground breaking projects with Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Matrix Research at the University of Manchester, using bio images to create innovative print and surface pattern design. Finally, Vicky Clarke is a digital and sound artist whose practice explores sound and sculpture, space and perception and manifests in installations, public performances and DIY instrument building. She uses sound as a material to explore chaos, chance and interaction. Working with electronic, digital and analogue textures; she has been artist in residence at National Media Museum, STEIM (Amsterdam) Q-02 (Brussels) and most recently performed at Berlin’s CTM Festival exploring human/machine interaction.

Manchester International Festival residency

response to ‘What is the City but the People?’

Our recent MIF residency responded to the Jeremy Deller opening piece, ‘What is the City but the People’ allowing us to extract bio data from participants via a pulsometer, this real time data was weaved together with our original code to generate digital patterns and motifs. The numerical values we used within the code were naturally occurring numbers taken from the participants lives.

Examples of this were, lottery win numbers, how many children they had, the number of the factory production line one participant had worked on for 30 years. These unique patterns were then screen printed by hand to give the motifs a human ‘analogue’ element. Lastly they were printed onto fabric and made into a ‘bio print kimono’. Here are some of the original projected images from the rehearsal days with the participants. We intend to develop and explore this method of working with people to create unique artworks, installations and potentially small run product designs.