This summer, CAMPLE LINE is delighted to present an exhibition of new and recent works in textile, ceramic and wood by Glasgow-based artist Katie Schwab that explore her longstanding interest in personal and social histories of craft, design and education. Often Schwab has taken inspiration from context-specific traditions of making, such as the Cryséde block printing factory in St Ives, hosiery manufacturing in Leicestershire and Fair Isle knitwear in Shetland. Increasingly, she has drawn upon her own family history of textile production, and begun to explore materials and making processes connected to wider notions of reconstitution and repair.
For this exhibition, Schwab responds to Cample Mill’s history as a site of hyperlocal rural manufacturing, which accommodated working buildings alongside millworkers' dwellings. As a reference to its operation as both a spinning and then a blanket mill, she will re-install small wares & hard wares in our downstairs space. Commissioned originally for Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in Middleburg in the Netherlands, the work comprises three narrow band weaves, woven at the TextielLab in Tilburg, each 15-20 metres long and incorporating numerous repairs, fixes and holes made in the weaving process.
Alongside these, the exhibition will feature a group of small ceramic works, including casts of a spiral of pleated Petersham ribbon that belonged to Schwab's great grandmother, which she pit-fired during a residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. She has said that finding and working with the ribbon 'has become a kind of metaphor for this journey into generational making.' Connecting with Cample Mill’s more recent use as a furniture workshop in the 1980s, Schwab will also install a new work incorporating braided chair spindles, temporarily diverted from a commission she is developing with Simon Worthington for Hospitalfield, Arbroath.
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Katie Schwab (b. 1985, Hackney, London) is based in Glasgow, and currently teaches at Edinburgh College of Art. She works with installation, textiles, furniture and moving image to explore personal and social histories of craft, design, and education. Embedded in the communities and contexts in which she works, Schwab’s projects incorporate collaborative workshops, archival research and craft-based learning.
A new commission by Schwab is currently inlcuded in Relative Ties: Mabel Nicholson, Nancy Nicholson, EQ Nicholson and Louisa Creed at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, curated by Harriet Loffler, Curator of The Women’s Art Collection. Recent exhibitions include British Art Show 9, Hayward Gallery Touring (2021-22), small wares, Vleeshal, Middelburg, The Netherlands (2021); Another Crossing, Artists Revisit the Mayflower Voyage, Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA, USA & The Box, Plymouth, UK (2021-22), A Working Building, The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth (2019) and This Interesting and Wonderful Factory, Clore Sky Studio Commission, Tate St Ives, St Ives (2018).