Between February and May 2025, I led a course titled Textile Theory for bachelor textile students at the Estonian Academy of Arts. The word textile comes from the Latin word texere, meaning ‘to weave’. This was the starting point for developing the course, in which we look at text as textile and textile as text. Textiles and texts borrow from each other a lot, and sometimes by using them interchangeably we can discover new avenues of thought. The following is an overview of one class during the course, wherein we tried a new way of looking for connections as an exercise in broadening our references.

Text has for long been intertwined with textile. Before written text, textile was also used in documenting and markmaking. One example of this is the quipu, a record-keeping device used in the Incan Empire until the Spanish conquest in the 15th century. A quipu works by tying knots into fibrous cords, using colour, length and order to categorise information. It was used for many purposes such as tax and census records, as well as poems and genealogies.¹

Similarities between textile and text are also prominent in written script. In the book Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold makes a visual comparison between writing and weaving, noting the similarity in the movement of creating both: ‘Just as the weaver’s shuttle moves back and forth as it lays down the weft, so the writer’s pen moves up and down, leaving a trail of ink behind it.’² By comparing written text to woven lines, Ingold brings forth the physicality of written text, focusing on the movement it takes to create a line. By comparison, to view the woven line as a written word, the connection between text and textile becomes more evident.

Another student brought a Finnish novel titled Kolkka (Backwoods) by Maria Matinmikko, published in 2019. She kindly offered to read aloud the love letter in the book which made her decide to pair the book with a sculpture by Eike Eplik titled They Take Root and Ring as If There Were A Tomorrow⁷. It’s worth noting that the student grew up in a bilingual Estonian-Finnish setting and had often voiced the feeling of being trapped between languages. She read the poem first in its original Finnish and then read her own translation in English. She mentioned that parts of the sculpture express parts of the poem which she feels unable to translate. 

Tulen luoksesi minkä tahansa maaston läpi, mihin

Tahansa vuorokaudenaikaan. 

Teltassa on savua, kippoja, simpukankuoria ja hiekka. 

Sinun kasvosi valohämyssä: maailmankartta ja pääte-

pysäkki. Nahkatakki himmenee nuoruutta vasten,

kipu lävistää ihmisen levyinä. Mutta me olemme

nyt täällä teltassa, sinä ja minä. Sanon, mitä lähei-

sempi joku on, sitä tuntemattomampi ja monimut-

kaisempi. Juon kaivon tyhjäksi, kurkkuni sisäänpäin

kääntyneen janon. Astiat kaatuvat, meri kuoristuu.

Yritän tarttua reiteesi kuin mastoon. Tuuli tyhjen-

tää kasvot ja avaa ne muodottomiksi. Käpäläsi kuin

Jokin ehdoton hyvyys harjaa otsani rautaa, kalloni

vinoa valoa. Niin siinä kävi: sinun mielesi puhkesi

ruukkuuni, ruusu. Niin historiat kiertyvät, näyttävät

Simpukkamaiset reittinsä. Niin unesta havahdutaan

valveille, valveilta uneen. Ranta kohisee kuin pieni

rujo avaruus. Mutta me olemme nyt täällä teltassa, 

sinä ja minä. 

Ruususi aurassa kauhon ja läikyn, lämpimien

vesien kala.⁸

In this way, the material aspect fills in the gaps in language and text. Eplik’s sculpture features a sheet of stainless steel, bent to stand like a bookend, with cutouts of irregular blob-like shapes. Around the steel structure are various details of porcelain shell-like objects, jewellery and hair. The love letter in the book speaks of holes and shadows, which the student connected to the cutouts in the metal, as well as soft touches which brought to our attention the delicate touches of hair and softly glinting jewels. The longer we spent with the book and the sculpture in parallel, the more we saw, eventually even noticing similarities between Kaarina Tammisto’s cover design for the book, and the shapes on the metal. Was this a link that happened subconsciously, brought about by the action of bringing the two objects together in the same space?

I visited the exhibition another time with a peer of mine, a student of the Craft Studies department at EKA who mainly works with ceramics. I was curious how someone from a different discipline would approach this exercise, considering that textiles and ceramics are both represented at the exhibition under the umbrella of craft techniques. This student brought along the book I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, first published in 1948, and decided to pair it with the work Tablecloth⁹ by Kärt Ojavee. The work is a stained tablecloth, serving as a material investigation and, in a way, a documentation. The tablecloth is covered in droplets and rings from the bottoms of glasses and cups. The student explained that in I Capture the Castle the characters are often sitting down together to drink tea because as a poor family this is one of the few ceremonies that they can afford, becoming a simple ritual. I couldn’t help but notice that in the connection between the fabric and the book, the ceramicist had instead brought into focus an object, the cup. I noticed that by pairing two different media we had arrived at a third; the combination of textile and text brought forth instead the ceramic cup.

This exercise allowed us to connect different materialities in a physical space and see elements in both the exhibited works as well as the texts that we brought that we otherwise potentially would not have noticed. Craig Leonard, a former professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada has an exercise called Performing the Library, which he conducts with students in his Printed Matter class. The exercise focuses on finding texts by browsing the bibliography of a book or by looking at books that are adjacent on the shelf, rather than through databases or other search tools. By using the book as an object and seeing the action of browsing at the library as a choreography and performing it, it brings forth another dimension of the space, one that focuses on the physicality of books and browsing, rather than the conceptual dimension of the text in a publication. This can also remove a lot of pressure and ceremony from a potentially daunting academic space, by interacting with it through play or pantomime. This is also what I aimed to do with the textile students at the exhibition. By using a book as a grounding tool to select a work it allows you to pay attention to a work through a different set of characteristics, ones that don’t immediately engage the conceptual meaning of the works. The exercise allows you to focus on the materiality of the physical space around you, leaving space for the conceptual significance to be revealed later.