Flax Turns

01/03/2019

21/01/2022

Christine Borland

Current Projects

Flax Turns

A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the medieval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax.
Dorothy Hartley

// Flax (2019-2021)

Christine Borland is a visual artist based in Kilcreggan, Argyll. She joined Deveron Projects in Spring 2019 for a 2-year research and production period to develop a flax growing project with the community.

Huntly once had a thriving linen industry. Replaced by cotton, this has been reduced over the decades. And so have the flax fields surrounding the town. How can we make the process of producing linen visible? What kind of things can we learn from this industrial heritage?

After seeing the artefacts in the former Brander Museum which document Huntly's thriving eighteenth century linen industry, Christine embarked on researching this heritage and its subsequent decline in slow time; through the growing, harvesting and processing of the flax plant which for centuries was widespread in the area. Her enquiry took place alongside a community of interested local growers and craftspeople, led by the Town is the Garden project team. Starting on 5th April 2019, a section of a circular flax planting was seeded every week for 6 weeks in the Brander Garden where it grew as the literal test-bed for this project. A regular series of talks and events to consider and share some of the project's wider themes took place throughout the growth cycle of the plant, reflecting the alchemical potential that simple seed-sowing can lead directly to production of the finest bed linen, lace or burial shroud.

// Flax Turns (2021-2022)

In the second part of her project, moving from Flax (2019) to Flax Turns (2021-2022) Christine learnt the process of flax spinning, together with textile artists Daisy Williamson and Lynne Hocking. Working both in person in Huntly and remotely at home, the three stayed in touch while spinning the flax grown and processed in Huntly by Christine and local participants during 2019. Continuing the project’s entanglement with seasonal practices, the spinning took place during the darker days of winter, with the accumulated thread becoming ready for weaving in spring 2022.

The starting point of the artist’s interest in the practice of growing and processing flax was Huntly’s heritage as a centre of the Scotland’s linen trade during the late 18^th Century. Although largely responsible for the wealth which built modern Huntly, the industry now remains visible only in traces throughout the town’s architecture, green spaces and the course of the River Bogie. During the projects many stages, from sowing to harvesting then processing the flax using replica tools to break, scutch and heckle it to a state ready for spinning, Christine has questioned the means and relevance of reclaiming and passing on skills associated with this heritage.

The production of linen in the North East of Scotland changed in the 18^th Century from a means to generate clothing and items for home and local use, into a thriving industry making cloth for trade in new colonial markets. To obtain the enormous amounts of thread required to weave the cloth, new Boards of Trade established spinning schools for women and girls through-out the Highlands, tapping into what they perceived to be a skilled ‘workforce’ in waiting. The spinning schools introduced the stationary spinning wheel to replace the traditional drop spindle, an archaic but efficient tool used across the world which enables the spinner to remain mobile as she works. This marked an important power shift for women who had previously been equally involved in all kinds of work relating to the family and community’s sustenance.

By learning a new succession of related growing and making practices, Christine has tested how we acquire and pass on knowledge as well as questioning why. Working alongside small groups of participants and demonstrating skills to larger groups, her project celebrates the possibility of intimate encounter across time and distance. Flax Turns explores ideas of 'embodied knowledge' – that the body ‘knows’ how to act; 'situated knowledge' (Haraway, 1988), which reflects the social identities and social locations of knowledge producers; and 'wayfaring', Tim Ingold’s description of "knowledge grown along the myriad paths we take as we make our ways through the world in the course of everyday activities"