Parallel Threads – Entangled Ends

A work by Janis Hanley and Angelina Martinez

I initially had a concept for a timeline for the entrance of the Parallel Threads exhibition that would combine visuals and narratives to tease out sthe aspects of the parallels and divergences between the textile industries of town of Ipswich, Queensland, Australia, and the region of New England in the United states.

I did a few rough sketches and sent them to Angelina, who used her brilliant graphic design skills to work magic.

It was a bit of a tall order, as it’s difficult to compare a town in Australia with three woollen mills (one a former cotton mill), to a whole region in the US with hundreds of mills, but I think we’ve managed to successfully achieve it.

We turned the globe upside-down and zoned the vertical spaces to Australia at the top and the US at the bottom.

Central to the design si the timeline in the middle, setting out the decades from 1790 to 2020, and graphically representing the global influences at play, affecting both countries.

For each country, the timeline progress from there, moving through national events and influences, to regoninal influence, to finally the local mills – Ipswich for Australia, and some significant mills in New England.

The overall message is that Australia was/is primarily a wool grower doinating the world market for decades, prospering off “the sheep’s back”, with some textile manufacture (roughly 5% of its wool clip); while a focus of the US was textile manufacture.

There are still commonalities in both the creativity, the gruelling work conditions, as well as the pains of closure and loss, that affected the whole supply chain an local communities.

We’ll just give a sneak preview of the timeline for now, but will update more when the exhibtion is launched.

Janis’s doctoral research focused on Queensland’s woollen mills in her quest to explore ‘What does heritage do?’: what does it create and how does it actively connect and entangle us?

Angelina explores disconnection of people and place through a weave of archival images, and reflecting on her own ancestry and connections to Ipswich.

A shout out to Annerley-Stephens History Group for giving us use of their history room on the few days we needed to be in the same physical space with a big screen.