Zoë's residency, ‘Making Mends: Weaving Woollen Wastes’, brings the ‘lost’ custom of woolgathering to the Custom House as a means to collaboratively explore relations between customs and wastes, places and times, with visitors, school children and local community groups.

 

Acknowledging relations between the vast mountains of textile waste generated in the west today, and the sharp decline in the value of British wool, Quick refers back to a time, at the peak of the Exeter Wool Trade, when Welsh wool was woven into Exeter Cloth. Exploring what it might mean to weave a Welsh yarn into the fabric of Exeter today, she frames her residency materially and symbolically around the acts of weaving and reparation.

 

Over the course of a week,  Zoë will process ‘waste’ wool from the Welsh uplands into yarn for making mends, inviting visitors to the Custom House to try their hand at carding and spinning and to join her in collaboratively mending a pile of blankets woven from ‘shoddy’ (reconstituted waste wool).  Zoë’s acts of mending during this residency will also include weaving Welsh yarns as stories and songs, as well as textiles, into the built fabric of the Custom House, in a performance that incorporates fragments of an old Welsh ballad.

 

She heartily invites you to join her! Come along and collaborate in our mending project, sharing skills and stories, and reflecting on the broader meanings of making mends with woollen wastes at the Custom House.

 

Could our tiny textile acts of repair have a ripple effect at the scale of a landscape?

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Part of a pilot programme of artistic interventions curated by Honeyscribe for Exeter Custom House.
Generously funded by Exeter Canal and Quay Trust