Crafting Geometry

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Supported by a Craft Council Spark Plug Award

The Constance Howard Gallery was delighted to receive one of the first Spark Plug Curator Awards from the Crafts Council in 2007. This awards scheme, which ran until from 2007 to 2010, aimed to provide the opportunity for a minimum of four curators each year to develop an ambitious and innovative exhibition project.

Crafting Geometry was a collaboration between curator and writer Professor Janis Jefferies and Goldsmiths Textile alumnus May Cornet.

The project sought to examine the creative and dynamic relationship between mathematics, mathematical forms and pattern through commission and collaboration, making new work from a particular maths and textiles archive, 'Common Threads', that is held in the Goldsmiths Textile Collection. Mary Harris devised and produced 'Common Threads' at a time when issues of gender, class and race were high on the agendas of mathematics education. Harris is a mathematician and committed teacher who developed ways of teaching mathematics through looking at textile objects.

Janis Jefferies, the team at the Constance Howard Gallery, and May Cornet were interested in ways in which the collection could be brought to a wider audience. In particular, we wanted to examine the creative and dynamic relationship between mathematics, mathematical forms and textiles.

Images by David Ramkalawon and Julie Graves.

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