Textile Diagrams


DATE
Thursday March 26, 2015
TIME
3:30 PM - 5:30 PM

Visual and Material Culture Research Seminar Series Winter Term 2. 3:30pm.

T’ai Smith, Assistant Professor, Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC

This presentation will consider how manufacturers in Europe and America codified textile and clothing production through the use of diagrams: lace and embroidery patterns (first developed in the sixteenth century), draft notation systems for weaving (seventeenth and eighteenth century), and sewing patterns (nineteenth century). Combining an examination of these diagrams with a Marxian analysis, I will show how these artifacts of material culture can help us understand different moments in the movement from proto-industrial to consumer capitalism.

This interdisciplinary seminar series on visual and material culture is for anyone with interest in this field across different departments at UBC and beyond. It is an informal forum to share research and exchange ideas, followed by conversations over a drink at the Ideas Wine Bar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Open to students, staff, faculty and community members in and around UBC.

This this term’s program: http://moa.ubc.ca/portfolio_page/seminar-series/

Conveners: Dr. Fuyubi Nakamura, Curator, Asia MOA, Dr. Nuno Porto, Associate Director, Research & Co-Curator, Africa, MOA and Dr. Anne Murphy, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies at UBC.

If you have questions for speakers for the series, please contact Fuyubi. Email: fuyubi@mail.ubc.ca

Image: Detail of plates from Margaret Abegg, Apropos Patterns: For Embroidery Lace and Woven Textiles (Riggisberg, Switzerland: Abegg Stiftung, 1978). Showing woodcut pattern from Vavassore, Essemplario di Lauori (Venice, 1532); drawnwork or Fili Tirati, Italian, 16th century; and embroidery, Punto Croce and Punto Spina, Italian, 17th century.