‘Apotropaic’ is the word artist and sculptor Jenny Steele sends me to describe her art, found in a book on Yorkshire folklore, meaning ‘supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck.’ I have been invited to discuss her Women in Print Residency at Artlab Contemporary Print Studios (ACPS) in the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), Preston, our two meetings taking place in June and September. The concept of the apotropaic is fitting, for Steele’s work is imbued with a sense of warmth and optimism, integrating bright colour, textiles, and craft techniques like the willow weaving she works into her sculptures.
Steele’s artworks often feature woven textiles and passementerie – the art of making coils, braids and fringing typically used as decorative trimmings for furniture and clothes – combining ex-industrial yarn with organic materials like grasses, leaves, and flowers. Her series Cast of Characters (2023) are woven creels, vessels dressed in fringes, tassels, and ribbons. Assembled, they make up a kind of festive community. A tassel is both grand and ubiquitous, Steele explains, showing me examples in the studio. They have been used as talismans for millennia, mentioned in the Old Testament as memory-aides for sacred commandments, and attached to clothing and hats in the Middle East for protection from harm. In early modern Europe, elaborate passementerie was a significant status symbol; a French guild mandated a seven-year long apprenticeship to acquire its skills. Tassels are used in uniforms and rites-of-passage ceremonies, often found on graduation caps. Yet they also add flair to ordinary household objects like bathmats and curtains. There is something universal about them.
Parts of Steele’s earlier commissions involved installations and printed wallpaper works inspired by the ‘Seaside Moderne’ architecture of the interwar period. Hotels like The Midland in Morecambe and the Art Deco buildings of Miami Beach (where Steele has spent two residencies) were designed to create feelings of pleasure and wellbeing. They are filled with light, sweeping curves and vistas to the sea. The architects’ intentions feed into her art: ‘I definitely feel like I want people to have more positive feelings from my work,’ she tells me, and later adds that ‘a lot of these buildings are decorative in the way that tassels are.’ Steele aligns decoration with a sense of generosity, prioritising sensory enjoyment and tactility over a conceptual approach, although it is clear to me that a great deal of research goes into her practice.
Seasideness, for example, is threaded throughout Steele’s work. Academic David Jarrett, who she collaborated with on a text for Practising Place: Creative and Critical Reflections on Place (2019), defines this as relaxation, longing, and a proximity to nature induced by being next to the sea. Coastal resorts were viewed as sites of convalescence for people suffering from illness, and soldiers traumatised by conflicts like the First World War. They are also integral to Britain’s historical leisure culture. ‘There’s the environment, the sounds, often nostalgia that you can pull into,’ Steele elaborates, ‘memories of being a child and being at the seaside.’ While on residency at Cove Park in Scotland, Steele gathered plants to use in her weaving. The location of Cove Park spoke to her personal history, being not far from the island of Little Cumbrae where her granddad was the lighthouse keeper. Steele’s gran would collect seaweed on the shore to sell on the mainland. Harvesting flora as resources for artmaking echoes her grandmother’s actions. It also encapsulates something I find striking about Steele’s work in relation to the natural world: there is always a bond linking people and place through labour and craft. Nature is not a separate entity.
When we first meet in June, Steele has spent the first few days of the residency experimenting with different ways of printing her textiles. ‘I’ve consciously been trying to do things I haven’t done,’ she tells me. ‘How can I explore the ideas I’m working with in the textiles in print? How can I create the feelings of the textiles in print? How is it different in print?’
There is a precedent for this interaction between textiles and printmaking. In the 1960s, Bauhaus-trained weaver Anni Albers (1899-1994) worked with the Tamarind Workshop in Los Angeles to experiment with lithography. The change in media enabled Albers, who worked primarily on a large loom, to unravel the interlocked surface of a piece of weaving into fluid lines of loops and knots that spiral around each other. As Albers wrote in her influential book On Weaving (1965), ‘the event of a thread’ can lead to ‘a realization of ever-extending relationships’, ‘just as it is possible to go from any place to any other.’
I can discern some of these ‘events’ in Steele’s own studio experiments. She tried a sturdy tabletop press for embossing her textiles onto paper, then fed some of these through the starwheel etching press to create even more detail. The result is all texture pressed into white paper, emphasising the marks and grains of the yarn’s fibres. The ghostly shapes look almost like fossils. Steele also made a lithograph of one of her tassels, adding an embroidery cord around the edge like a cartouche, and started to make screen prints using watercolour, painting onto a clean silkscreen. The unexpected elements of translating something into print is particularly enjoyable for Steele: ‘You don’t know how it’ll come out.’ The translated passementerie objects become abstracted from their original forms and gain new associations. One watercolour screen print of a tassel made from dried corn, with a shaggy skirt of pink and purple threads, evokes an aquatic plant or perhaps a fairy.
The repetition of printing seems akin to the repetitive nature of textile-making. Whether creating multiple impressions with a press or weaving threads together, there’s something ritualistic about enacting these processes over and over. When I ask Steele whether she ever thinks of printmaking as a ritual, she laughs gently: ‘In some ways I think it’s just an art process!’
Yet ritual is an important aspect of Steels’ practice. Her project Rituals for Tomorrow, funded by Arts Council England, led to the creation of two large scale sculptures. One was made from an antique rush cart once used in community processions and the second from a mahogany boat. They are both transformed by adornment with tassels, cords, and woven pieces that bristle with colour. Some of the textiles were made through collaboration, in workshops by former members of the Gorton Visual Arts group in Manchester and the Walney Weavers and local groups in Barrow and Walney Island. Steele taught passementerie and the use of a backstrap loom, which involves a strap wrapped around the waist. This portable method is one of the earliest forms of weaving, and a particularly embodied experience. Steele describes the joy of showing people how to make things by hand: ‘when you go through a process and then they make something, it’s quite empowering.’
The Gorton Rush Cart draws on the playfulness and appealing absurdity of many folk rituals. Steele relates the revelry of the Sowerby Bridge Rushbearing Festival, a survival of the once widespread custom of bringing fresh rushes for the church floor each year in late summer. An ostensibly religious ritual becomes a conduit for collective fun. Sixty men draw the cart, while a girl ‘sits on top, and everyone has decorations and puts stuff on their hats, and then they just ride her around!’ she explains. The ‘everyday creativity’ that such a ritual represents is crucial to Steele’s sense of her own practice.
‘I like the idea that rituals are traditions that are connecting you to the land,’ Steele tells me. She finds connection to place by using natural materials, as at Cove Park. Weaving for the boat sculpture (titled Charon after the ferryman – or ferrywoman – of souls in classical mythology) incorporated local plants from Art Gene’s Allotment Soup, a community resource on Walney Island. At our second meeting, Steele shows me how she’s been using plants for embossing, both fresh and dried. Some of them have been gathered from just outside the studio, where the rosehips are in the hedges. Pairing organic matter with textiles demonstrates how closely humans are enmeshed with nature, whether through collecting nearby plants or marking time through seasonal folk rituals.
To quite a different effect, Steele has begun to play with scale by screen printing enlarged, monochromatic images of coiled braid and tassels at a monumental size. She has also continued working with watercolour and screen printing. The prints become subtler as more are pulled, the image wearing away in parts as the ink fades. Within Steele’s print interpretations, the passementerie pieces move even further away from their original function as ornaments to be applied to something else. They are not attachments but become complete forms in themselves.
I valued the opportunity to discuss Steele’s residency in situ, experiencing the bustle of the studio, its strong scents and bulky presses, glimpsing other artists’ ongoing projects on desks and drying racks. As a space it seemed enviably industrious and companionable. The ACPS archive room where the majority of our two conversations took place also contained parts of the archive of Gwyneth Alban Davis, who ran a printing press in Cumbria from the caravan she lived in during the 1940s and was a key inspiration for the creation of the Women in Print residency. After both visits, I came away full of ideas and book recommendations to chase up, such as Dimitris Xygalatas’s Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (2023), which discusses how rituals as stressful as firewalking afterwards reduce cortisol levels in participants’ bodies.
What I find inspiring about Steele’s art is the continuous interconnection between people, nature and craft. It centres the primacy of the practical processes of artmaking, the importance of thinking by doing. ‘For me,’ Steele says, ‘making is the most important thing.’ As Steele translates her textiles into print, I reflect on how this artistic ethos might be translated into writing. I try drafting this article by hand, imitating the patient processes of printmaking and weaving, my handwriting unspooling to the rasp of a pencil. Typing out the words on my laptop, fingertips on the keys, feels like both a more mediative and more physical task than before. The apotropaic quality of Steele’s work seems expansive. I feel uplifted by the conception of art as continuous and intuitive making, encouraging collaboration. Art, words and print becoming something organic and textured, a tight plait of experimentation, community and creativity.
This exploration was informed by a series of conversations with Jenny Steele, the sixth in a series of written responses to the Women in Print artist residencies at Artlab Contemporary Printmaking Studio, UCLan, Preston. www.artlabcontemporaryprint.org.uk
Iona Glen is a writer and researcher currently based in Edinburgh. Her mother’s family has lived in West Cumbria since the 1970s.
This exploration is supported by UCLan.
Published 04.12.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
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