Rural Spot: Politics of Craft at Samhain

Garment Mapping

Tyler, Rachel Siobhán ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6633-0247 (2025) Rural Spot: Politics of Craft at Samhain. In: Rural Spot: Politics of Craft at Samhain: Mapping Garments, 31st October - 2nd November, Timespan Heritage & Arts Society, Dunrobin Street, Helmsdale, KW8 6JA.

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Abstract / Summary

As part of The University of St Andrews and Timespan's programme Rural Spot: Politics of Craft, this practice-based research investigates how clothing can hold stories of care, memory, and community, and proposes a new method which situates garments as material surfaces comprised of care, memory, and social networks. "Garment mapping" is a collaborative, critical, spatial research practice which combines multiple participatory methods to explore how garments function as repositories of lived experience. Collage, stitch, and colour intersect to create “garment maps” — visual and tactile portraits of the lives our clothes have lived and the connections they carry.

Mapping is used to uncover how our garments can become tools for storytelling, empathy, and reimagining how we make and relate to one another. This collaborative workshop builds on this approach, utilising a form of counter-mapping to create original artefacts that trace the layered histories and meanings embedded in personally meaningful garments. The workshop posits tools to uncover how garments can become tools for storytelling, empathy, and reimagining how we make and relate to one another.

Situated within critical craft, fashion studies, and new materialism discourse, the research positions making as both a methodological and political act. It challenges dominant fashion systems structured around disposability, speed, and the erasure of labour by foregrounding slow practice and care as a form of creative critical agency.

Dialogic and making processes operate in tandem, enabling personal narratives to be considered within global commodity and socio-economic networks. Garment mapping functions as both method and theoretical tool, facilitating the generation of connections between materiality, memory, and meaning. The resulting artefacts serve as interpretive and speculative tools, demonstrating how participatory, collaborative practices can generate novel forms of knowledge.

Craft is celebrated as s a radical and reflective act: one that values lived experience, challenges dominant fashion narratives, and recognises care as a form of creative and political power.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Other)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	craft, rural, garments, mapping, queer methods
Subjects:	Architecture Art History & Theory Creative Art & Design Creative Art & Design > Fashion, Textiles & Costume Design History, Geography & Environment History, Geography & Environment > Heritage Studies Creative Art & Design > Fine Art Research Social Sciences
Department:	School of Architecture, Design & Interiors
Depositing User:	Rachel Tyler
Date Deposited:	02 Jul 2026 11:05
Last Modified:	02 Jul 2026 11:05
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6377

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