This summer, CAMPLE LINE is delighted to present an exhibition of new and recent works in textile, ceramic and wood by Glasgow-based artist Katie Schwab that explore her longstanding interest in personal and social histories of craft, design and education. Often in her practice, Schwab has taken inspiration from context-specific traditions of making, such as the Cryséde block printing factory in St Ives in Cornwall or hosiery manufacturing in Leicestershire. Increasingly, she has drawn upon her own family history of textile production and begun to explore materials and making processes connected to wider notions of reconstitution and repair. She has said: ‘I want to acknowledge the vulnerability of things, objects, relations, emotions – they are in a constant state of flux, of breaking down and being reborn.’ 

For the exhibition, Schwab brings together four works that have their starting points in specific objects or in particular contexts and craft traditions, but which resonate in different ways with aspects of Cample Mill’s own material, social and economic history – described by Isabella Smith as ‘a microcosm of the macro story of the rise and decline of light industry on these shores over the past 200 years.’

Schwab will re-install small wares & hard wares in our downstairs space. Commissioned originally for Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in Middelburg in the Netherlands, the work comprises three narrow band weaves, woven at the TextielLab in Tilburg, each 15-20 metres long and incorporating numerous repairs and holes made in the weaving process. 

The exhibition will also feature a group of new ceramic works, including a porcelain cast of a spiral of pleated Petersham ribbon that belonged to Schwab’s great-grandmother, which she pit-fired during a recent residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. She has said that finding and working with the ribbon ‘has become a kind of metaphor for this journey into generational making.’ Touching on Cample Mill’s more recent use as a furniture workshop in the 1980s, Schwab will also install a new suspended sculpture incorporating braided chair spindles, temporarily diverted from a commission she is developing with furniture maker Simon Worthington for Hospitalfield, Arbroath. 

A newly commissioned short essay by Isabella Smith accompanies the exhibition.