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Memories of Skill in Scottish Woven Communities

Creative Innovation across Disciplines Seminar Series

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Scottish basket-makers and Dr Stephanie Bunn from the University of St Andrews have been working with regional museums and archives to explore how the past can look through focusing on basketry as a fabric of society.

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As part of the School of Art and Design’s Creative Innovation Across Disciplines Research Seminar Series, Dr Stephanie Bun, University of St Andrews, presents: Memories of Skill in Scottish Woven Communities.

The paper explores the diverse ways memory is embedded in skill in Scottish vernacular basket-work. Through Woven Communities, a collaborative research project about Scottish traditional basketry, Scottish basket-makers and Dr Stephanie Bunn from the University of St Andrews have been working with regional museums and archives to explore how the past can look through focusing on basketry as a fabric of society.

In the process, they have uncovered how hand skills, learning and memory are intertwined in multiple ways. These range from sources for reminiscence, to the power of skill to engender pleasure and intergenerational communication, to the role of hand memories for people with dementia, to the capacity of hand-skills in therapeutic recovery and their role in design thinking and mathematical understanding.

Dr Stephanie Bunn

Stephanie Bunn is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. She has conducted field research into felt textiles among high mountain pastoralists in Kyrgyzstan and with basket-makers in Scotland. She has learned many of the textile hand-skills in her area of study.

Her research focuses on creativity, skill, learning and the environment. She is currently working on the book of her collaborative research into Scottish basketry, memory and hand-skill. Stephanie has made several museum textile collections, and curated the first ever British Museum exhibition on Central Asian nomadic textiles, Striking Tents, publishing the associated book, Nomadic Felts (2011).

For any enquiries, please contact the Research Office by email or by telephone on +44 (0)115 848 2301

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Nottingham Trent University
 Nottingham, NG1 4BU

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