Claire working on her stitch journal, a daily practice that she likens to meditation.
“What happens to the people in a community when the way of life that sustained them for a hundred years ends?”
Claire working on her stitch journal, a daily practice that she likens to meditation.
“What happens to the people in a community when the way of life that sustained them for a hundred years ends?”
Claire Wellesley-Smith credits her mother, a music teacher, and her father, a university librarian, for nurturing the curiosity around which she has built her unconventional career. “My parents brought me up to wonder and to really look at and notice details and relish those things,” she says. Claire is a textile artist, author, leader of community-based arts projects, and PhD candidate researching how communal slow craft activities, especially textile handwork, impact individual and community resilience and well-being. She is also the single mother of four daughters.
I visit Claire at home in Shipley, a town in the northern English county of West Yorkshire that during the nineteenth century, along with its larger neighbor Bradford and much of the surrounding region, became an international hotbed of textile manufacturing and, to fill the many jobs, immigration. As I drive into town from the east and head down Saltaire Road, I cannot help but notice the massive Salts Mill, a defunct Italianate stone textile mill turned modern commercial center that, when it opened in 1851, was the largest industrial space in the world. Adjacent to the mill is Saltaire, a self-contained village where the millworkers and their families lived. “They are writ large,” Claire explained to me when we spoke for the first time on the phone a few months earlier. Their visual impact stands as a testament to the area’s social and economic history, both its rise as a boomtown of the industrial revolution—thanks in part to the area’s long-standing sheep population and the nearby railroad and waterways—and its eventual demise as mill work moved offshore starting in the mid-twentieth century. “There are literally textiles in the landscape,” Claire tells me. And those textiles have become the actual and metaphorical fiber that holds together much of Claire’s work. “What happens to the people in a community when the way of life that sustained them for a hundred years ends?” she asks. “And is there a way to use handwork and heritage as tools for recovery?”
Claire grew up east of Shipley in Leeds, another mill town that boomed during the industrial revolution. Some of her earliest memories are of her mother pinning out dress patterns on the dining room floor and her grandmother knitting her sweaters. “In my family, talking was mostly done when accompanied by making,” Claire wrote in her 2015 book, Slow Stitch: Mindful and Contemplative Textile Art. Her first memory of making something herself goes back to a Sunday school class when she was six or seven and her teacher brought in small squares of floral cotton fabric and taught the children to hand-stitch patchwork pillow covers. “I absolutely enjoyed it,” Claire recalls. In primary school, she learned how to make bobbin lace, and in her early teens, she created lots of dangly beaded jewelry, but she suggests, “I probably enjoyed organizing the materials more than making stuff out of them.”
Claire can step out the back door of her house (built in 1904) into her small garden and descend the steps on the other side of the gate to get to her cavernous studio. The mother of four children, she appreciates the flexibility that working from home allows.
At the University of Leeds, Claire continued with what she calls “haphazard” making: “I lived in a shared house with six other girls, all but one fine-arts students,” she remembers. “We patched, mended, and adapted things we bought from jumble sales and charity shops, and swapped loads of our stuff all the time.” Among her most vivid recollections are the 1960s-style minidresses that they’d alter to fit and wear to concerts, and a khaki army jacket, the back of which she embroidered with flowers growing from the hem up to the shoulder—“a labor of love” that she regretfully lost track of, she tells me.
Despite all the time she spent making and the pleasure she drew from it, surprisingly, not once did Claire consider taking an art class. Instead, she earned a degree in political science with supplemental studies in theology and sociology and then, in 1993, took a job helping nontraditional students find ways to finance a university education. She enjoyed her work and stuck with it until 2004, when she decided to stay home with her first three daughters, whom she gave birth to in quick succession in 1999, 2001, and 2003.
Leaving the structure of a fulfilling office job proved emotionally challenging for Claire. To help her out at an especially difficult time, her mom and dad offered to watch their granddaughters one afternoon a week so that she could enroll in a creative textiles class that intrigued her. “Attending the course offered me a quiet, creative space and some time away from the pressures of being at home with three very young children. I found working with textiles quite grounding,” Claire remembers. She also made friendships that endure to this day and recognized how enriching and connecting conversations that happen through making can be. Over the next few years, Claire continued with the classes, which covered everything from embroidery to dyeing to printmaking, and created a new career for herself developing and running community arts projects while raising her children, including another daughter born in 2009. Busier than ever as a parent but with an unquenchable curiosity, in 2013 she decided to further develop—and, in her own mind, legitimize—her art practice by enrolling in a master’s degree program in visual arts. Then in 2016, she began a PhD program to do more formal research on the benefits of craft-based engagement so that she would eventually be able to share her findings widely and make a positive difference in more people’s lives.
One of two battered Edwardian leather armchairs that Claire found in the attic of an old house she used to live in, layered with textiles, some of which she made herself. Although she began this layering practice to prevent further damage to the chairs, over time they have become a sort of domestic art installation in the front parlor. The red embroidery on the chair back, a family heirloom from Hungary, dates to the nineteenth century.
Seeking a PhD implies a certain level of bookishness—indeed, Claire does engage in some heavy reading and deep thinking—but her daily life is very much that of a busy working mom. When I visit, we hang around the house until Claire’s daughters are home from school and she is sure her youngest will be watched over by one of them. Then she leads me on a walk to Salts Mill and Saltaire, where she excitedly points out details that fascinate her, such as massive hooks attached to the sides of the buildings that, when the mill was active, were used to hoist bales of unspun fiber from the barges and deliver them to the spinning rooms on the top floor.
Next we head to Claire’s personal garden allotment to see her many dye plants. Claire started the garden in 2010; since then, she has established four more as part of community projects in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Back at her studio, which is in the basement of her house, Claire shows me her textile work, which tends to be small and produced slowly, often with bits of repurposed fabric and lengths of thread that she dyes using plants she forages or grows at her allotment or in containers on her back porch. Each weekday morning, she tells me, she walks her youngest daughter to school. On the way, the two of them stop to look at a particular horse chestnut tree, paying attention to small changes. “These are the punctuation marks in the day,” Claire says. “They can be really quite joyful, even if you notice just one thing, like a plant growing in the cracks of the sidewalk.”
At her garden allotment near her home, Claire focuses on growing indigenous dye plants like wild madder (in Claire’s hand here), dyer’s broom, and lady’s bedstraw; nonindigenous dye plants that have played a role in local history, such as woad (the yellow plant in these photos), indigo, and weld; plus dye plants that have secondary culinary, medicinal, or decorative uses and fruits and vegetables for her family. She also uses the wild nettles she forages there to make string.
In all her work, Claire is inspired by provenance, or a local connection, always seeking to engage people by initiating dialogue about what exists within and around them. And she finds that when they are sitting alongside one another, slowly making textiles with their hands, the impact can be profound, no matter their life circumstances—whether the maker is an asylum seeker who only two months earlier had to flee her own country and now finds herself in one of Claire’s community groups, learning patchwork techniques; a patient in a mental-health facility who is participating in a long-term seed-to-fabric project that includes learning about the history of the madder plant in the region, growing the plant, and then using the roots to dye woolen cloth; or one of the more privileged participants who sign up for the slow-stitching workshops she offers at her home studio and occasionally at other locations. “Textiles are universal even if our heritage stories are different,” Claire says. Though the lives of her students can differ drastically, their receptivity to conversation while making textiles proves to be a common denominator. In fact, many of her groups continue to convene on their own even after the formal programming where they met has concluded.
“There’s a huge amount of pleasure I get from working with textiles in a direct making sense,” Claire tells me as she threads a needle with woad-dyed silk at her kitchen table and we sip cups of tea. “There are also the amazing, resonant stories they hold. You can look at a garment worn fifty or a hundred years ago and understand the shape of the person who wore it.” Claire is working tiny blue flecks into her stitch journal, a length of repurposed curtain linen that she has been “journaling” on since 2013. For Claire, this daily practice resembles a moving meditation—each stitch like a breath, in and out.
Claire brought me to the massive Salts Mill, which was known as “the Palace of Industry” when it opened in 1851 and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to offices, retail stores, restaurants, and galleries. Raw materials like wool and alpaca arrived via the canal, which runs along the back of the mill, and finished cloth departed via the railway that runs along the front (only a corner of which is visible in this photo). At its peak, four thousand people worked at the mill, producing about eighteen miles of cloth each day. Starting in the mid-1950s, as more and more production was moved offshore, the economy in this area and many other parts of northern England began to suffer, leading to high unemployment and social unrest.
Claire mentions the work of twentieth-century French American artist Louise Bourgeois, whose abstract cloth drawings—stitched-together fragments of personal clothing and household fabric—she first saw in an exhibition in London in 2010. Like Claire, Bourgeois believed that sewing could be a source of emotional repair, famously stating, “I have always had a fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.”
Claire’s own artwork is, like Bourgeois’s cloth drawings, small-scale, abstract, and poignant, a piecing of fiber, memories, and narrative. A work called Resist pays homage to the women who marched for peace in Bradford, England, in 1917 and the women (and men) around the world who marched again in 2017. An untitled piece incorporates fabrics dyed with plants Claire grew at her allotment during one growing season, evoking a poetic sense of time and place.
She says that “living a reflective life, living in a critical way, actually engaging with and questioning what is around us and looking at the reality of it” is her modus operandi. In Shipley, and in northwestern England in general, that often means questioning the impact of the industrial revolution and the subsequent deindustrialization on life there, for better and for worse. Claire reminds us that the existence of machinery that can produce yards of cloth in mere seconds does not negate the benefits of working on cloth by hand. Self-sufficiency, competence, empathy, periods of contemplation, and a closer connection to our history, our fellow makers, and the effect of mass consumption on the environment—all this is possible when we work one slow stitch at a time.
For Resist, a 2017 art exhibition, Claire marked the centenary of a local woman’s peace march by covering cloth from an old woolen blanket with hundreds of running stitches using silk thread from one of Bradford’s now-defunct mills, plus materials she found along the march’s route (plants she used for dyes; fabric scraps to stitch the base; and random bits of metal, such as rusty nails, to create resist prints). Each stitch, Claire explains, was a mark of resistance, a commemoration of the local women’s efforts to end to the ongoing carnage of war in 1917, as well as a nod to the women around the world who similarly marched in protests in 2017.
A sampler Claire created using fabrics and threads she dyed with plants grown in her garden during a single year.
Teaching samples Claire uses to demonstrate ways of collaging and stitching naturally dyed and repurposed materials.
Claire stores the many colors of thread she dyes on old wooden clothespins until she is ready to stitch with them.
The back of an English paper–pieced patchwork Claire made using fabrics she dyed with plants from a community allotment project. She recorded how she achieved each color on the papers.
“Textiles are universal even if our heritage stories are different.”