Woven in Aire

Amazing to see the use of echome in the interactive installation Woven in Aire, as part of a final year project of a group of Theatre and Performance students at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries. 

Matthew Dangerfield, Jennifer Finlay, Leila Black, Rosie Margree and Anna Duffield, under the supervision of Professor George Rodosthenous and Dr Tony Gardner, used echome as a primary means for the audience’s interaction with fabric, thread and pattern, in a piece that explores the complex history of the textile industry in Leeds.Through research at Leeds Industrial Museum and Leeds University’s Special Collection as well as practical experimentation with fabrics and sound, the group went on a journey to understand embroidery; once a highly valued skill passed down through generations of mothers to daughters, filling cultures with rich pattern and thread. 

The installation explored how those patterns were snatched by colonial forces and the journey of the cotton used in Leeds textile mills. 

The use of fabric as a way to provide the material basis for the making of sound through the digital interface is an ongoing theme in the echome project, first explored through the Sonic Blankets project with artist Sunny Vowles.