On stuff and nonsense: the complexity of cloth

This is the second of my essays the significance of fashion and textiles as cultural practices. Preceding work on the cultural legacy of the cotton industry as an invisible substrate of the canvas underlying the painter's 'toile', representing the repression of knowledge of both slave labour and the unconscious maternal haptic dimension of the visual, is presented in my essay 'Urban memory/ Suburban Oblivion' in Crinson (see RA2 return 4). This paper led to an invitation to lecture at the University of East Anglia in connection with the Sainsbury Art Centre's exhibition of the work of contemporary textile artists 'Cloth and Culture' (2007).