2025-2024 current research-Lace as sound
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Lace as Sound evolved from a Research Fellowship at the Powerhouse Museum to translate lace as sound. I was fascinated by complex spatial relationships in lace created through a simple gesture of hand and thread. A collaboration unfolded with composer Mara Schwerdtfeger to translate stitches as musical scores. Four lace frills of a 19th-century English Branscombe were analysed. The empty spaces in lace are akin to silences in music; both create form, rhythm, and texture. Stitches became notes, their dots designed to reference early punch card systems in textile production, a precursor to computation.
To reimagine these harmonies as a new contemporary lace, sonic patterns were digitised through state-of-the-art Shima Seiki seamless knit technology. The complexity imbued in hand lace was matched and honoured through a coded knit programme. Over 1,600 needles simultaneously produced a lace knit comprising two distinct structures, front and back. Poetically, when the Shima machine knits the musical scores, it “sings” the lace, giving material form to untold lacemaking histories.