Reading the Thread Book Launch

The RWA invites you to the launch of the book Reading the Thread: Cloth and Communication on Saturday 22 February 2025, 12pm. Discussing the book will be its editors Professor Lesley Millar MBE and Professor Alice Kettle and some of the contributing authors.

Reading the Thread: Cloth and Communication brings together artists, theorists and designers to explore the nature and use of cloth as a means of record and communication. Cloth is constructed from threads and, in acknowledging its qualities of recording or communicating a story, we are reading the threads.

The book explores, through imagery and ideas, the agency of cloth to shape and communicate the sensations and emotions connected with human experience. Divided into four sections on reading cloth, challenging the stories it tells, following the thread of its narrative and finally anticipating its future, Reading the Thread allows a variety of viewpoints and a diversity of voices, without favouring theory or specific cultural approaches, to interrogate cloth as a record of experience within its social, historical, psychological and cultural context. The authors explore our encounters with cloth and its role in the exploration of identity and biography, representative of passage, exchange, life and death.