I’d like to introduce this very short talk by quoting some phrases in everyday use, that we say without perhaps being aware of their original meaning: ‘being on tenterhooks’, ‘cloth ears’, ’shoddy work’,‘ dyed in the wool.’ These phrases have been used for hundreds of years and actually all come from the weaving industry. The words hold meaning for us today, they are expressive, without us necessarily knowing about their original meaning, and I find that contradiction fascinating. It’s as though we carry in our genes, unconsciously, an appreciation of the work our ancestors did with their hands, it still means something to us.

The same week I started working as a mender of fine cloth at Fox’s Brothers Mill in Wellington (and if you would like to see just how fine their cloth is, I’ve brought some samples to show you, so do come and nab me afterwards if you’d like to see and feel the quality!).. .the same week that I started working as a mender, I discovered that I had ancestors who had been immigrant silk weavers, so the nimble hands of my ancestors had also been doing similarly fine work with cloth. I have large hands, but have always been drawn to do fiddly fine work, so maybe there is something in the genes! Most of us, if we were able to trace our family tree back far enough, would find relatives who had followed manual skilled trades. In my family, apart from the weavers, there were also a couple of straw bonnet makers, a blacksmith, coal miners, a carpenter, and lots of agricultural labourers. As someone once said, ‘People made things back then’.

As well being a mender, I've worked as a hand embroiderer, an embroidery restorer, and a seamstress. All these skills were learnt on the job. It's only recently (now that arthritis in my hands has made the mending work I was doing impossible) that I suddenly have more time to develop my artwork. The artwork that you see here today is rooted in my experience of working in the textile trades. 

With this exhibition, using sound, spoken word and image, I’ve tried to create a sense of a place in which industry and nature collide, specifically the area around the Fox’s woollen mill in Wellington known as Fox’s field and Wellington Basins.

I’ve tried to communicate, not only what it is a mender in a woollen mill does all day, but what it feels like to work as a mender in a mill, and how that way of working, with the attention to detail that it requires, has influenced my perceptions the natural world. It’s as though the stillness of the mending room has taken root in me and I think it strengthened in me the habit of being still, of listening better and observing things with a steadier focus.

It has also given me a source of special terms and words with which I can express myself. So just like those weavers centuries ago, who stretched out their cloth to dry on tenterhooks and someone thought that the words ‘being on tenterhooks’ could be a very apt way of describing how tense someone was feeling, when in one of my poems I liken the swallows skimming over the surface of water to menders’ fingers hovering over cloth, the image comes naturally, from out of my own personal experience. My work in the mill has helped me feel a strong sense of place, because it has provided me with a vocabulary to describe it.

In the poems you may hear words you’ve not come across before, to do with specific tools we used and weaving or mending terms. Burling irons, kemp, dropped ends etc. If you’re interested, in the booklets that Sami Green has designed - which you’ll find on the table as you come in, is an explanation of those words and the booklets also contain transcripts of the poems if you would like to read them while you’re in the church.

Nowadays, when less of us are able to find paid work that we can do with our hands, when so much in life seems to be done remotely, digitally or online I think we are in danger of losing a rich seam of vocabulary and expressiveness derived from working physically and that I find worrying, because we are physical beings and need to use all our senses to feel connected with the world.

But here I am using digital media in my work when I’ve just bemoaned the fact that the digital world seems to be taking over! For my cloth banners are printed digital images based on my photographs, printed onto linen cloth by a small uk firm that specialises in fabric printing.

Taking the photographs and collecting the sound recordings involved actually being in those landscapes and settings and using my senses directly. In the audio loop you will hear the stops and starts and clattering of industrial weaving looms in action recorded in Fox's mill. I think weaving looms are very percussive and musical! When I hear a loom start working after a period of standing still, I feel happy and I relax and feel that somehow all is right with the world! I don't expect you to feel the same, but I hope you might enjoy listening to the variety of sounds the looms make.

You also will hear the weir and underwater recordings in the streams near the mill. You will hear bird song and a slowed down Robin song which makes it sound like a very exotic bird! I've slowed it down so that you can hear the incredible range of notes it's sings that are usually beyond our hearing. In one of my poems I mirror the intricacy of the Robin song to the fineness of the weave we could not see unaided. 

I found it very telling, that when I came to hem the edges of the banners I felt I simply did not want do it on the sewing machine, even though I could have machine sewn them in a fraction of the time. I had to hand sew each one to sort of counterbalance all the digital work that this project involved. The hand sewing giving me an opportunity to reconnect my hands with the artwork again as it was nearing completion. 

In the images I have overlaid two, sometimes three separate photographs. I’ve played with colour and light as those are things I wanted to bring into the church (perhaps my early experience working as an ecclesiastical embroiderer influenced me there in wanting use lots of colour and a kind of soft furnishing!) I also wanted to use colour in such a way as to enhance and bring out the patterning of foliage and grasses and water ripples in the images, since pattern - and the pattern interrupted, is what a mender is programmed to look for in the cloth.

The enlarged close up of a feather is a swan’s feather which I picked up in the area that’s known as Wellington Basins; pools of water that were used by the mill if there was ever a fire. Overlaid on top of the photo of the swan’s feather, is an enlargement of my finger print. You’ll see quite a few fingerprints or images of my hands on the banners. They are there for two reasons:

Firstly I wanted to somehow honour the invisible work of the cloth mender. If she (it usually is a she) does a good job, her work won’t be visible. Before the cloth is sent out to the finishers, every centimetre of it is touched at least twice by the mender and yet her skill is invisible.

So I wanted to stamp my finger print onto my pieces - and here I found it interesting that when I was reading back my notes, I found I’d written the word ‘pieces’ when I meant to write ‘banners’. For in the mending room your ‘piece’ is the length of fabric you are mending, the word ‘piecework’ coming from the time when workers were paid per piece, rather than by the hour. Anyway I wanted to stamp my pieces (or banners) with my fingerprint as a kind of honouring of menders and their hidden skills. For so anonymous is the mender that sometimes her very fingerprints wear out (or mine did anyway!) Hours spent handling metre upon metre of the same cloth, would leave my palms and fingers shiny with lanolin and worn smooth with the friction and then the clocking out machine wouldn’t recognise my finger print and someone from admin. would have to come and programme the machine to accept the print of a lesser used finger! This usually righted itself after I started working on a different weave, though I did used to fantasize about what crimes an invisible mender might commit during my fingerprint-less phases!

The other reason I wanted to overlay the mender’s fingerprint or hand against a backdrop of tree foliage or wild grasses, is because I’m also trying to convey the sense of a mender’s gentle touch in her witnessing of the natural world. A world that in our times is surely in need of much mending and gentleness. 

I’d like to thank the people involved in making this exhibition possible: Sami Green the curator, the Rev Martin Little, Somerset Community Foundation who funded it, Fox’ Brothers Mill in Wellington who allowed me to go in and record their looms and last but not least, Daniel Birch from Ignite at The Engine Room in Bridgwater, who introduced me to the wonders and technicalities of making and editing field recordings. Without their know-how, support, encouragement and funding it couldn’t have happened.

I’d also like to point out that this isn’t the first artwork celebrating Somerset’s woollen industry to be displayed in a Somerset church. There are some Somerset churches that have the most amazing Tudor carvings on their pew ends depicting wool workers going about their business, equipped with napping shears teazle-heads and burling irons. I wish I could remember where they are, someone here might know, but they’re well worth visiting!

Sally Light.

Feb 8th 2023, St John the Evangelist Church, Highbridge.

Folk and Locus Exhibition curated by Sami Green Creative.