Woven Narratives
Portsmouth Historic Dockyard Residency
Textile works made during a residency at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, developed from experiments with restricted-access historic blueprints and plaster. Working from rarely seen archival drawings, the series explores the relationship between architectural documentation and material trace, letting the blueprints shift between record and abstraction.
Process
The drawings were mirrored and repeated until their technical linework read as pattern rather than instruction, then printed onto silk organza and velvet. The two materials were chosen against each other for their contrasting qualities of transparency, weight, and tactility: organza holds the drawing as something almost weightless, while velvet gives the same marks body and shadow.
The finished cloths were shown in the dockyard’s own spaces: hung against whitewashed brick, laid across open floor joists, draped over the ironwork of the buildings the drawings describe. They reflect the layered histories embedded in that architecture. Archival material becomes a new form, connecting past and present.