Free Entry: A two-day exhibition running from 10:30 to 3:00pm Friday 18th July and Saturday 19th July
Silk Music is an exciting project which launched in Sudbury in Spring 2025. Through a series of ten weekly workshops at Sudbury Arts Centre, the CLIP Sudbury youth group have explored the cultural heritage of silk in Sudbury while developing exciting new skills in music technology, performance and textile crafts.
The project began with a group visit to Gainsborough Silk Mill, where the group experienced the historic mill and documented it through photography, field recordings, and oral history interviews with experts. The group studied the patterns of the punch cards which programme the jacquard looms and in subsequent workshops at Sudbury Arts Centre have been exploring the translation of loom programming to musical programming, creating beats and melodies inspired by the patterns, linking textile production with musical creativity.
The project culminates in the weaving of a new sheet of textile that visually represents the resulting sound compositions. Weaving music from silk, then silk from music. This woven artwork will be showcased in an exhibition at Sudbury Arts Centre, alongside a soundtrack of the music created, celebrating the participants’ creativity and Sudbury’s textile heritage.
Silk Music is a collaboration between CLIP and Vancci Wahn, a curatorial studies researcher from the School of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex. Her PhD project, Indigenitude: Crafted Artivism in Taiwan, featured in the British Textile Biennial 2023, examined counter-narratives in contemporary Indigenous textile and documentary film works through the lens of international textile trade and filmmaking history. As an extension of Indigenitude, this project serves as a research-based experimental production, exploring the audiolisation and visualisation of both medium legacies.
