Ethnography: Photo-elicitation with Weaver

London

2019

Narrative Made conducted a photo-elicitation and a knowledge transmission experiment at London weaving studio, Rare Thread. It was carried out with a mission to discover how weavers (and artisan at large) may respond to seeing the documentation of their bodily involvement in the textile-making process and how they would communicate crafts with the relevant materials available.

The project revealed the weaver’s awareness and language use in communicating embodied knowledge, the various perspectives on the before (producing) and after (produced) lives of the textiles, and roles of bodily movements in craft knowledge transmission. Most importantly, it highlighted how the understanding and presentation of bodily knowledge in the making process may contribute to the perceived value of crafts by the makers and viewers.

The experiment aims to contribute to studies of how to better credit artisans in relations to intellectual property rights in both educational and commercial contexts.