It’s certainly taken a lot of courage, but here’s my first substack and I am The Cloth Botherer. It’s slightly imperfect, mostly because I’m not a designer and still need to work on the layout, please allow first timer slack, the occasional flaw.
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I hope you’ll come and join me for textiles thinking, reflection and maybe occasional humour. This has been quite the deal, in both thinking and making. I have lots of stuff to share, please join me in my first steps.
PS, There’s room for a few more in this lift! Also, a link in my link tree on my home page…please subscribe, you don’t need to pay to read it x
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#textilewriting #substack #textiles #narrativethreads #criticalwriting #threads #textileart #storytelling #theclothbotherer #clothbotherer #angelamaddock
Thank you to the team @newlynexchange for making this short film when we visited social fabric back in February.
All about mothers and mothering. I’m very happy to have been included in this exhibition, which continues 26 April 2025.
A MOTHER’S DAY SPECIAL🪡 SOCIAL FABRIC🪡: ARTIST FOCUS 👁️🗨️
A series spotlighting the artists and artworks featured in Social Fabric, we’re thrilled to introduce: ✨ANGELA MADDOCK ✨
Watch the full film via the link in bio 👆🏽✨
‘Mothers are Wolves’ is a body of work that explores the transitional space between mother and child as described by the paediatrician and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott: a holding space, a place of nurturing and attachment, but also one of greed, obsession, and desire.
‘Brother Love’ is a tender piece inspired by the love shared between siblings. Maddock knitted these forms intuitively without a pattern, returning to them every so often, to unpick and make small adjustments, as she works, attentively revisiting their narrative and her part within it.
ℹ️ Based in Swansea, Angela Maddock is an artist and academic who describes herself as being ‘bothered by cloth’, which is to say, how it feels next to her skin, how it’s made and unmade, how it is one of the fundaments of our existence.
In Mothers are Wolves Maddock plays with the material function of scissors to suggest a playful space can also be formless, overwhelming, and potentially smothering. Scissors enable separation, and describe the process of shaping ourselves, giving form to the concept of being an individual.
Maddock uses the form of the scissor ✂️ as the metaphorical tool for this shaping of ourselves through separation.
As you walk around Mothers Are Wolves you can admire the tension between beautifully represented scissors that are bound or incomplete, unable to function and as Maddock notes “Scissors that fail are troublesome things.”
According to Donald Winnicott: at birth mother and child are as one but as the baby grows and becomes more independent it transfers some of the attachment it had for its mother onto other, often textile, objects.
Listen to BBC Radio 4, Archive on 4: From Donald Winnicott to the Naughty Step (58 minutes) One of the 20th century’s most famous psychoanalysts, Winnicott gave 50 BBC broadcasts about motherhood between 1943-1962.
Mothers Are Wolves and Brother Love are on show at The Exchange.
@angelamaddock
Kit’s Quilt
My daughter reminded me, as I was stitching, that baby rabbits are called Kits, so here’s Kit’s quilt complete with embroidered, appliquéd and printed Kits.
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Made from a softly worn linen bed sheet and cotton shirt, brushed cotton remnant and a tiny square of Japanese cotton printed with… a rabbit! I’ve used lightweight organic bamboo batting. Quilted with Olympic sashiko thread.
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#quilt #quilting #babyquilt #cotquilt #cotton #linen #applique #embroidery #stemstitch #backstitch #flystitch #piecing #patchwork #ninepatch #ninepatchquilt #improvisedlogcabin #logcabin
Friday’s studio wall.
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Making Babies, Shinichi’s tricycle and the dentist’s chair.
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I’ve had two lovely meetings today which have made me very grateful for zoom. The first with @shellytippingoldsmith in Ramsgate, where we talked of knitting babies and weaving lumps of coal, as you do. The second with @natsumi_sak in Japan, and we shared thoughts on Japanese textile traditions, mingei and the maternal. I met Natsumi teaching one of my quilt workshops ❤️ so glad for that.
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Still working on Chapter Six of the Cloth Botherer, hoping it will be ready soon, you can catch the earlier chapters via the link in my biography.
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#knittingbabies #makingbabies #knitting #brotherlove #softsculpture #textileart #textiles #applique #embroidery #stemstitch #theclothbotherer #studiowall #juxtaposition
Stitching myself. This was supposed to be a textile sketch, a quick test for a bigger plan, but in attempting to cover the bleed from the red silk thread - now I know - it’s become a proper labour and I may have over egged the pudding. But, I’ve learned plenty along the way!
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#embroideryportrait #embroidery #sewing #stitching #applique #wip #couching #backstitch #runningstitch #textiles #arttextiles #selfportrait #overegged #learnasyougo
Growing tentacles in the sunlight.
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My view from here, the stitching stool. I found myself stroking these legs - I guess I should say blades, but legs feels right - as if they might be my own.
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Giant, soft scissors ✂️
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#tentacles #legs #scissors #softsculpture #textileart #textiles #soft #linen #sunlight #tactile #tactileplay #yellow #shadow #mothersarewolves #clothbodies
Friday’s studio wall.
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I made these a few months back, appliqué in cotton, thread and linen onto linen, from drawings made in Japan last November. I think of them as postcards - or pages for a cloth book - I’m not quite sure where they’re going yet, but they make me smile 😊
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#studiowall #textiles #applique #textileart #arttextiles #collage #postcards #smile #clothbook #embroidery #japan #sewing #koi #gingko #crane #origami #drawingintotextiles #drawing
Giant Cloth Scissors
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I’ve spent today revisiting old friends, the enormous cloth scissors I made almost a decade ago for ‘Mothers are Wolves…’ they’ll be exhibited in ‘Social Fabric’ @newlynexchange in November.
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What I’ve realised in making some very gentle updates, is how important these felt for me when I first made them, and how they continue to resonate in my work. So many reflections drifting through my head as I’ve inspected them, which requires some wrangling, stitched and patched. So many that I’ve decided to write about them in my next Substack, published - reads so swanky - on Friday 20th, or thereabouts. You can find earlier chapters by following the link in my biography.
PS., these were first shown @missiongalleryswansea in 2015
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#shears #scissors #clothbody #repair #mend #softsculpture #textileart #sewing #holding #containing #arttextiles ##textilewriting #frenchlinen #bedsheets #softness #winnicott #theclothbotherer
Studio Wall Sketch
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Finding my way back here after an unintended hiatus. Here I am, almost two years old in a favoured and well remembered garden. I’d picked a daisy and was holding it for the camera.
I’m working on kitchen table ways of transferring photographic images to cloth, this is transfer paper onto embroidered wool. It leaves a coating, which I first thought too plastic, but it’s growing on me…unlike my fringe!
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#textile #textiles #arttextiles #annafreud #daisy #embroidery #gazing #seedstitch #embroidery #phototransfer #studiowall #childhood #play #sewing #garden #kitchentable #diyhair
Blooming Daisies.
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I finally pinned a large piece of bamboo batting to my studio wall, which has been transformative. There’s been lots of moving around, recording, shifting, snipping…and the slow emergence of hexagon daisies. These are part of my Anna Freud project, where daisies appear as a symbol of resilience - growing from cracks and the thinnest soil - and childhood play. And now I’m on the train, London bound, a pile of daisies in the making at my lap.
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#daisies #daisy #hexagon #patchwork #epp #sewing #stitching #textileart #arttextiles #textiles #annafreud #pieces #piecing #yellow #sunshine #onthetrain
A Textile Sketch.
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So much backwards and forwards.
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I’ve written about my ‘workings out’ before, I think even in my Substack ‘The Cloth Botherer’, and here’s the latest example. I’ve been unpicking and piecing and embellishing and spinning myself in circles, and then I reached back to these hexes from 2018 and reminded myself of Elaine Showalter’s writing, and here I am, something slowly emerging that feels like it might be a good fit…
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#textiles #textileart #annafreud #piecing #epp #piecework #patchwork #couching #play #closelyobserved #sewing #studiowall #theclothbotherer #sketch #textilesketchbook
