Amy Tidmarsh

Amy Tidmarsh is a multidisciplinary textile designer and researcher driven by a physical, inventive approach to hand-based textile skills. By combining intuitive ways of working with an in-depth focus on research, she explores ideas centred around craft, process, and performative textiles. In 2021 she was awarded The Textile Society Critical Writing Open Award for her dissertation. She graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a BA (Hons) in Embroidery and teaches across Further and Higher Education, specialising in Foundation Art and Design, and Textile Design. She is currently based between Leeds and London, UK.

RE-PRESENT // ACTIVE TEXTILES: CRIMP, PINCH, DYNO

By re-presenting the way we look at a moving body and its relationship to space, I question how material grids can communicate the interaction between a climber and the wall. Through collaboration with City Bloc climbing wall in Leeds, and bouldering climber Ayesha Khan, I have explored how a performative action can be communicated through textiles.

Methodical textile processes such as patchwork, dyeing and functional construction techniques give me a visual and material language to communicate the unspoken or unseen moments that happen within specific environments. In a tangible way, I unpick the action of climbing; the pressure points, the moments of tension and release, how the body balances, shifting weight from one anchor point to another, and find ways to re-present this relationship.

The collection of textiles can be worn or performed both on and off the wall. I am interested in the potential for this work to act as an intervention; enhancing, guiding or inhibiting movement, manipulating grid-based movement to choreograph a material performance between body, textile, and space.