On Weaving

Artists: Corin Sworn, Luke Fowler

"The film is a rich portrait of the Klein home as well as of active sites of textiles production in the Scottish Borders…. Its use of analogue film to capture these places in all their colour and texture provides a lasting snapshot of our region's architectural and industrial heritage." BBC preview on film On Weaving, a 16 mm film and accompanying collection of photographs, was recorded through High Sunderland, a house built

by Peter Womersley in 1957 for textile designers Bernat and Margaret Klein, and now inhabited by design historians Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton. This study ‘through’ the house means less to historicise the building’s design and residents, than consider a structure in which change and reflective process flows. Dynamic processes of Modernist architecture, textile design in the Borders, gender, finance and mechanization within creative economies and twentieth century émigré influences from Eastern Europe.   High Sunderland was built to cinematically “frame” the landscape that surrounds it. Its large glass windows unfold the surrounding landscape in sections, in turn this movement of seasonal light presents outside time arriving within. On Weaving uses the dynamics of these ‘moving images’ to foreground interaction between natural and human-built architectures while highlighting economic and social orders that frame these relations.   This interest in inter-active forces could be considered a sort of weaving or twining. A metaphor responsive to the Klein’ innovations in textile design, and a way of braiding the present with a range

of economic and social processes in the area of Hawick, and the borders more broadly. On Weaving is a 2025 collaborative film by artists Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn, commissioned by Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival