Weaving music from silk and silk from music. A creative project for young people in Sudbury to explore the cultural heritage of silk through music technology, sonic arts, and textiles.
This project is made possible with the support of Suffolk County Council’s Creative Project Fund and the Ministry of Education, Taiwan.
Silk Music is an exciting new project launching in Sudbury in Spring 2025. Through a series of ten weekly workshops at Sudbury Arts Centre, our CLIP Sudbury youth group will explore the cultural heritage of silk in Sudbury while developing exciting new skills in music technology, performance and textile crafts.
The project will begin with a group visit to Gainsborough Silk Mill, where participants will see the historic mill and document it through photography, field recordings, and oral history interviews with experts. The group will study the patterns of the punch cards which programme the jacquard looms and in subsequent workshops at Sudbury Arts Centre explore the translation of loom programming to musical programming, creating beats and melodies inspired by the patterns, linking textile production with musical creativity.
The project culminates in the weaving of a new silk sheet that visually represents the resulting sound compositions. Weaving music from silk, then silk from music. This woven artwork will be showcased in an exhibition at Sudbury Arts Centre, alongside a special live performance of the music created, celebrating the participants’ creativity and Sudbury’s textile heritage.
Silk Music is a collaboration between CLIP and Vancci Wahn, a curatorial studies researcher from the School of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex. Her PhD project, Indigenitude: Crafted Artivism in Taiwan, featured in the British Textile Biennial 2023, examined counter-narratives in contemporary Indigenous textile and documentary film works through the lens of international textile trade and filmmaking history. As an extension of Indigenitude, this project serves as a research-based experimental production, exploring the audiolisation and visualisation of both medium legacies.
