The Everyday Performing Textiles

Sammanfattning: Living as a human being in the 21st century is a more or less constant three-dimensional textile experience. Textiles have a continuous proximity to our bodies as clothing but also as an essential material in our dwellings, both with practical and emotional functions. The Everyday Performing Textiles derives from my deep interest in the qualities and embedded connotations of textiles, the stuff that affectively shapes our material reality. These soft things play different roles in our lives, as parts of a web of function and meaning.  In this thesis I focus on the unobtrusive position of everyday textiles, searching to reflect upon the significance and substance they have within our homes. I predicate that our wellbeing is deeply dependent and connected to the comfort of textiles – it being an emotional material as much as a physical. I use the expectations of materiality as a method, balancing between the familiar and the strange, to challenge and expand our perception of cloth, both as a statement and a query of its value in modern society. I depict everyday textiles in a skewed way, mixing the realistic and the unrealistic, to create an expanded perception of them – playing with their immanent, possibly unspoken, expectations. The Everyday Performing Textiles is an acknowledgement of our textile reality – the existence of this interactive, interdependent relationship in our everyday practice of living.