This body of work, comprising an exhibition, catalogue, website and education programme (252 events), results from a three-year collaborative research project with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia (SCVA, UEA). The project investigates the cultural role of cloth in the development of contemporary textile practices emerging from traditional practice, and extends the field of research in this area through its exploration of the transition from the repetition of traditional practice, to the development of a contemporary language of making, and the factors that influence that development.

The research adopted a cross-disciplinary, open-ended approach, taking as its starting point a material enquiry into the processes of making in order to identify the cultural context ingrained within these processes. Semi-structured interviews were conducted on an individual basis with 35 artists from Estonia, Finland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania and UK. In each of these countries textiles have traditionally played a central role economically and as a carrier of the narrative of place; and contemporary textile artists are using that embedded narrative within the discourse surrounding their practice. This was the first time that the work of contemporary textile artists from these countries had been brought together in the context as identified by this research.

The project has been disseminated through an exhibition of new work, created to exemplify the thesis, to a wide academic and non-academic, specialist and non-specialist audience. The exhibition at SCVA in 2008 placed the research within a framework of cultural transition epitomized by the World Art Collection, SCVA; it has also toured to the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester.

The research was funded by: SCVA, The Gatsby Foundation, Arts Council England, The Japan Foundation, The Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, and the Embassies of Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.