Haptic & Hue

Jo Andrews
Haptic & Hue

Haptic & Hue's Tales of Textiles explores the way in which cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives. It looks at how fabric traditions have grown up and the innovations that underpin its creation. It thinks about the skills that go into constructing it and what it means to the people who use it. It looks at the different light textiles cast on the story of humanity.

  1. 10月3日

    Flax is Back! The Great Linen Revival

    There is a global flax revival underway. In the great linen belt of North Western Europe, the land under cultivation has more than doubled in a decade and linen production is steadily increasing worldwide. After years of being spurned for ‘easier’ man-made fibres, or cotton, once again linen is being valued. It may only be around half-a-percent of the world’s textile fibres at present, but this time it is being grown not just for fine fabrics, but also because it's gentler on the land. It needs less water, fewer pesticides and fertilizers, and new uses are being found for it too, from creating surfboards to skis, from acoustic insulation to car doors.    Flax looks back as well as forward. Like no other yarn, it is the ancient fibre of civilisation. Linen has walked the long centuries alongside mankind. In Europe and Western Asia, its cultivation reaches back thousands of years to the beginning of human settlement and farming. It clothed the pharaohs of Egypt in life and death, it powered the ships of ancient Greece and Troy, it is mentioned more than 80 times in the Old Testament. This is the fabric that wrapped the Dead Sea Scrolls to keep them safe down the centuries.    Join us this month as Haptic and Hue travels to Ireland, once the undisputed centre of the world’s linen processing industry to see what it is making of the great flax revival and how Irish linen is faring.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

    41 分鐘
  2. 9月5日

    Elizabeth Wayland Barber & The Age of String

    Exactly thirty years ago a book came out that changed the way we think about textiles and fibre and the role they’ve played in the human story. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber became a best seller. What she said was revolutionary. Until then people thought that textiles were a by-product of civilisations and that processes like weaving were around five or six thousand years old. Wayland Barber was the first person to understand that they are central to the development of human society, and she said, spinning and weaving were far older than we realised and went back to the beginnings of human social development. She coined the phrase The String Revolution and suggested the Stone Age would have been better called the Age of String.   Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book: Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years with its radical ideas, put textiles at the heart of the human story. It played a major role in creating a new generation of expert textile archaeologists and in getting the subject taken seriously. She helped make it possible for them to search for ancient fibre and textiles and, crucially, to understand that what they were seeing wasn’t detritus or trash but something precious that has a great deal to tell us about human beings and what they are capable of. She was also one of the first people to give us a way to value the work of women in pre-historic societies.   To celebrate the book’s 30th anniversary a new edition has been published with an updated afterword by Wayland Barber. This episode of Haptic & Hue is devoted to a rare interview with Elizabeth Wayland Barber in which she tells us how she came to write the book in the first place and the ideas that lay behind it.   For more information about this episode and details of the discount on the book please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

    36 分鐘
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214 則評分

簡介

Haptic & Hue's Tales of Textiles explores the way in which cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives. It looks at how fabric traditions have grown up and the innovations that underpin its creation. It thinks about the skills that go into constructing it and what it means to the people who use it. It looks at the different light textiles cast on the story of humanity.

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