Fustian Cloth

Christine Borland, Fustian Cloth, 2023, Handspun/handwoven linen and cotton cloth 

In Borland’s recent installation for the British Textile Biennial 2023, 4 films were projected onto the Fustian Cloth which was woven on site by the artist and Scottish master-weaver Lynne Hocking, on a loom built into the structure of a mediaeval barn in East Lancashire. ‘Fustian’ is the historic name for textile with a linen warp combined with cotton weft. Two of the films originally projected onto the cloth are presented in Approaching Home – The Flax Grower and The Flax Spinner; the other 2 accompanying films, The Cotton Grower and the Cotton Spinner echoed the processes of producing the Fustian Cloth’s cotton weft. 

During the Industrial Revolution, fustian was exclusively produced in Lancashire, the heartland of the British textile industry. As with the majority of textile production, the years leading up to the Industrial Revolution saw the production of fustian gradually move from women’s domain in the home, into factories, changing the perception of the status of women, their labour and agency. In East Lancashire this transition period coincided with the Pendle Witch Trials which saw nine women and one man executed by hanging. Many of those implicated in the trials, did indeed consider themselves to be witches, in the sense of being;

“village healers who practised magic, probably in return for payment, but such men and women were common in 16th-century rural England, an accepted part of village life” Wikipedia, Pendle Witches.

The intimacy of the connection between body and process established by hand-weaving, which Christine and Lynne embodied during the production of the Fustian Cloth, is explored by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead in relation to its disruption by the new discipline of the factory;

“The woman at her hand-loom, controls the tension of the weft by the feeling in her muscles and the rhythm of her body motion; in the factory she watches the loom, and acts at externally stated intervals, as the operations of the machine dictate them. When she worked at home, she followed her own rhythm, and ended an operation when she felt - by the resistance against the pounding mallet or the feel between her fingers - that the process was complete. In the factory she is asked to adjust her rhythm to that of the rhythm prescribed by the factory; to do things according to externally set time limits.”

The linen which makes up the vertical warp of the Fustian Cloth is home-grown and hand-processed both in Scotland and by spinners in the Lancashire area who ran a spinning school in the local market as a way to share their expertise with the local community. The cotton is imported from Malawi in Africa, where Scotland has enduring colonial-era ties primarily through the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Livingstone who grew up near the artist’s home in Ayrshire, began life as a handloom weaver. Although his presence in Malawi ultimately opened the country to the import of international textiles, devastating local production, he was inordinately interested in the growing and processing of local cotton and sent back many textile artifacts, now housed in the Museum of Scotland. 

The transport of a bale of cotton from Malawi to Scotland was facilitated during a 2017 research trip by the artist, where she visited and recorded the work of cotton farmers, spinners and weavers in collaboration with the Department of Museums and Monuments in Malawi. Its’ import disrupts the route historically engraved by the ‘triangular trade’– an economic model predicated on the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, in which Europe supplied Africa and the Americas with finished goods, the Americas supplied Europe and Africa with raw materials, and Africa supplied the Americas with enslaved laborers. In her essay Christine Borland's Philosophy of Making, Caroline Stevenson wrote of the work;

“The making of textiles is rarely an individual effort. Its material production most often relies on many geographically specific and collective processes. To trace the origins of a piece of cloth is to open up a world of interconnected lives and places, from local and small domestic production to mass industrial manufacture. Conceptually, textile is also an active producer of history. It is a socially enacted material that weaves through our everyday lives: the interface between our bodies and the world.”