Textile as Structure — Expanding Practice Through Resistance

This workshop is an invitation to challenge how and what you stitch into. Working with hard, resistant, or industrial materials, we’ll explore the tension between fragility and force, softness and structure, metaphor and material. Through making, discussion and critique, we’ll investigate how resilience, restriction and adaptation show up in our materials and ourselves.

This isn’t about learning a “technique”; it’s about expanding what your practice can hold.

On Weight and Resilience: A Conceptual Expansion

Weight, in this project, is both physical and symbolic. The materials I work with: slate, metal and rigid textiles possess actual heaviness, density and resistance. These characteristics stand in stark contrast to the traditional associations of quilting and fabric work, which are often perceived as soft, pliable, and comforting. By stitching into weighty, unyielding surfaces, I am deliberately confronting the limitations of the body and the burdens we carry, both visible and invisible.

This physical resistance of material mirrors the daily pushback experienced by those living with chronic illness, disability, or ongoing adversity. Tasks that once felt effortless may become slow, painful, or impossible. Yet within that resistance lies a deep well of creativity, adaptability, and endurance. Each stitch into stone becomes an act of defiance and care; a testament to the quiet, often unseen forms of strength required just to continue.

Resilience in this context is not about bouncing back or overcoming in a heroic sense. Instead, it’s about enduring within constraint. It’s about reconfiguring the familiar - softness, comfort, domesticity, into something that speaks honestly to lived experience. It acknowledges that sometimes comfort becomes confining, that softness can be worn away, and that survival may look more like persistence than transformation.

By exploring weight as metaphor, I invite others to consider:

• What emotional or societal weights do we carry?

• How do those weights shape or restrict our movements, our identities, our creativity?

• What does it mean to hold resilience not as strength in spite of, but as adaptation within difficulty?

Through this lens, the project becomes a shared inquiry, one that connects personal narrative, community experience, and material experimentation.

WORKSHOP DATE & TIME

XX Month 2025, 

We’ll start at 10.00am and finish at 4pm.  You’re welcome to arrive from 9.45am and make a hot drink if you wish. 

LOCATION

Patrick Studios, St. Mary’s Lane, Leeds LS9 7EH. Parking available through ‘Pay by Phone’ parking app.

ACCESSIBILITY

The workshop will take place on the first floor of Patrick Studios which is owned by East Streets Arts. There is a lift. Please let me know if you have any accessibility needs.

LUNCHTIME ARRANGEMENTS

There is a microwave and a kettle at the studio available for use.

WHAT SHOULD I BRING?

Materials will be provided. You may wish to bring your notebook/sketchbook.

ANY FURTHER QUESTIONS

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch: andrew.walker@network.rca.ac.uk