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Weaving a Future: The Fight to Save a Loom and Preserve Textile Arts
In a tale of art, education, and determination, a community rallied to rescue a vital piece of textile history from being lost forever.
“Rachel, bad news,” the text message read. “They’re disconnecting the loom tomorrow.”
That message spurred textile artist Rachel Halton into action. In October 2022, she learned of the impending decommissioning of a $160,000 Jacquard loom at RMIT, where it had been a cornerstone of weaving and textile design courses for 20 years. The loom, nearly 3 meters high and weighing more than half a tonne, was a complex machine that Halton couldn’t bear to see end up in landfill.
Jacquard looms use punchcards – an early form of code – to guide the lifting and lowering of threads. Photograph: Stuart walmsley/The Guardian
“It was my day off and I got up, jumped out of bed and just went down there,” Halton says.
The loom was the only one of its kind in the southern hemisphere, and one of only a handful in the world. It “elevated what you could do as an artist”, she says. Students enrolled just to have access to it. International artists visited especially to weave on it. It became integral to Halton’s creative practice.
When she arrived at campus that October morning, ready to “chain myself to that tree”, the only other person there was the man coming to decommission it.
“He disconnected it in front of me,” Halton says. “It felt like taking a family member off life support.”
Word spread, and a collective of weavers, teachers, students and alumni hatched a plan to save it. They paid a technician to disassemble it safely,hired a trailer to transport it,and squeezed it into a former student’s lounge room while they looked for a permanent home.
Textile artist Daisy Watt, a member of the collective, described the episode as “a perfect snapshot of the state of everything” about the way higher education treats fine arts and crafts.She noted how valuable tools and increasingly rare skills are condemned by,as Halton says,”a decision at the end of a spreadsheet”,while community groups do thier best to salvage the remnants.
The Warp and the Weft
Customary Jacquard looms used punch cards to guide the lifting and lowering of vertical (warp) threads. This ARM AG CH-3507 loom could be operated by computer or by hand, enabling complete control of every thread, making the design possibilities endless.
Watt and technician Tony de Groot work together to restore the loom. photograph: Stuart Walmsley/The Guardian
Watt has “a very special affinity” with the loom. She’s been using her coding skills to update its electronics. “We normally think of craft in isolation from technology but it’s just this gorgeous, messy thing,” Watt says. “A piece of effective craft technology based on making something beautiful.”
At the time the loom was bought, textile design at RMIT was taught as a stream within a diploma of arts – a course that “people would relocate their whole lives for”, according to a teacher, lucy Adam.
In 2008 RMIT replaced the diploma with a certificate four training package. Teachers and trade unionists argued they would diminish education and result in systematic de-skilling.
The testimonies of textile design teachers at RMIT suggest that, despite their best efforts otherwise, this is exactly what occurred.
