Perspectives On Making and Viewing: Generating Meaning Through Textiles

This chapter places textiles within a communication paradigm, considering cloth as a narrative form and examining the relationship between authorial intention and viewer interpretation. The chapter draws on findings from two case studies carried out at six UK locations over a two year period using the author’s own printed textile work. The visual content of the work was constructed within a semiotic framework in order to create narrative textiles and test viewers’ interpretations of the images and their perceptions of the textile medium. Within the chapter the relationship between digital and hand rendered processes from the perspective of the author as maker are examined. The chapter then focuses on viewer perceptions of the textiles from the first case study, explaining how responses to the work necessitated an increase in the hand-developed elements of the textiles produced for the second stage of the research.