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Flying to Brisbane to attend Close Ties gave me that space of disconnection which no other means of transport seems able to provide, and the evocative title of this conference set up a mental play of word patterns and meanings. The juxtaposition of the words 'close' and 'ties' stimulated conflicting patterns of meaning: close as near, stifling, completion, or secretive; ties as connections, relationships, bondage, or knots. It is these contested readings which underpin the exploratory intentions of the conference, extending the implications and interrogatory possibilities of contemporary textile and fibre practices.
The metaphorical use of textile language to explain and explore relationships has been well-documented in recent times by writers such as Sue Rowley, Dorothy Jones and Rozsika Parker.1 Marian Pastor Roces explores the words of Tagalog to decipher the construction of social attitudes and the hierarchical positioning of art in the Philippines. Tagalog is the language of the ethnolinguistic group which originally inhabited many provinces of the Philippines: under Spanish rule, it became the national language and the core of contemporary Filipino. The Tagalog word for art, 'sining ', specifically excludes craft practices in its broad definition, however words describing textile processes are commonly used in personal descriptions of relationship and character.2
Undoubtedly, Ruth McDougall's choice of the title 'close ties', for the exhibition of tapestry works by Kay Lawrence and Marcel Marois, was intended to function ambiguously, thus to demand more from its audience than generally might be expected of textile work which employs a traditional tapestry process using the 'close ties ' of stabilising knots. By repeating the title in naming the conference, McDougall challenged a conventional critique of textiles and the assumed seamless repetition... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline