Claire Charnley, 'Lloyd Loom of Spalding, Lincolnshire, 1998'
In: Artists-in-Research 1996-98. Edited by Alistair Raphael and Victoria Clarke. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 54-61.
Lloyd Loom of Spalding is currently the only factory to manufacture furniture using the Lloyd Loom process in the UK. Lloyd Loom furniture is quintessentially English. Colonial chairs, bedroom furniture an linen boxes are made by a novel and intriguing method of wrapping brown strips of paper around lengths of wire. These paper-covered wire strands which resemble fine cane are then woven into large sections on a melodious and beautiful mechanical loom. This style and method was devised by the American inventor Marshall Burns Lloyd and is still employed by the company today, together with the highest standards of British manufacturing experience.
David Breeze's new company set about revitalising and capitalising on the concept of Englishness which is present in this furniture. The workshops and studios are a strange mix of small enterprise, big ambition and local expertise. The language and methodology of the team of 'experimenters' who work to create new pieces is not dissimilar to that of an artist making in his/her studio, sharing the expertise of his/her associates and neighbours. Clare Charnley was based on the factory floor alongside workers.
I had undertaken residencies before (in a gym, in a shopping centre, etc.) but this was the first time I had approached a residency in a specific place without a determined outcome. This shifted my emphasis; I was not spending six weeks in a large furniture factory to leave at the end with a van full, disk full or cassette full of works that would eventually form part of an exhibition. I was entering a situation without a clear idea of how I could use it. A little scary.
Sometimes it is only when your assumptions are contradicted that you become aware of their existence. So, although I approached the residency with an open mind, I discovered that I had expectations that were challenged. The shifts of understanding brought about in this process were to become active in my work.
In terms of working and thinking processes, I discovered more similarities than I had expected. Because people in the factory knew so much about the process of making, there were things I found that I didn't need to explain - how long and how many reversals of decisions it takes to develop a new piece for instance. However, having built up a practice by researching in private and displaying things only when they had reached some sort of resolution, it took some time for me to feel comfortable about making unresolved pieces in public. Later I became interested in the question of how to present artworks that were only partly successful in a way which displayed the gap between the object and the intention.
At first I thought of myself as an outsider entering a group but over time things became more complex. For one thing the production staff didn't necessarily consider their job to be a major component of their identity and would often tell me about themselves in terms of other locations, such as their pasts, their home lives, or their hopes for the future. I found myself engaging with people through the stories they told (the stories we told each other) rather than the situation we were in. The idea of taking objects or images from the factory, however fascinating, and putting them within an art context started to feel irrelevant, silly.
Using the materials and processes that were available - that is, the ones the workers were using themselves - I began to construct or imagine little objects in response to conversations. But here I encountered another problem in that I realised I was running the risk of the work functioning as a sort of anthropological 'report home'; things that worked as part of a conversation within the factory risked becoming banal outside it. At this point I started to view the illustrated stories in terms of my own subjectivity, as being as much about my own conjectures as their tellers. My residency diary/notebook then began to weave itself into this process.
At the end of the residency, with the material still evolving in my mind, I made an artist's book entitled Nothing Like This, And Not Their Real Names that explored the relationship between my objects and conversations. What I took away from the residency was primarily to do with people; other opportunities that the Lloyd Loom factory offered were only used to further these relationships. This might seem surprising, one encounters plenty of people outside residency circumstances everyday, but I felt that the activity of working alongside these men over a sustained period opened up a particular dialogue. It was important that I was seen to be doing my job and I consciously developed means of making myself more visible.
This worked more effectively with the production workers than with those working in administration. Although the residency had been set up with care and experience, the contact person at Lloyd Loom had (as I understood it) been asked to leave shortly before my residency started. His successor had to deal with me while having to deal with a new post and was too busy to take up inIVA's offer of a meeting.
Although the production staff were friendly and helpful, the management seemed unsure as to why they were taking part in the project and how it might benefit the company. This did change a little towards the end of the residency, but they seemed to be thinking in terms of outcomes, e.g. publicity, rather than the more abstract qualities I was interested in.
The six-week residency was an intense period that opened up new ways of working that I would not otherwise have experienced. I had changed and surprised myself. I devised a variety of ways to navigate this particular environment although it would be difficult to devise a formula that could be applied to other situations. If I were to take part in another residency I might well approach it differently. That seems to be the point.