JESSICA LIGHT AWARDED GRANT TO PRESERVE THE ENDANGERED HERITAGE CRAFT OF PASSEMENTERIE
The centuries old historic trade of passementerie is at risk of dying out in the U.K. There are only three individual makers and only a handful of companies still practising the skills and techniques of hand-making tassels, tiebacks and rosettes and hand-weaving trims. Professional cord making on a rope walk is particularly at risk as are some forms of woven braids.
The passementerie market is very small and already crowded and therefore very competitive, so how to pass on those skills without damaging the livelihoods of people already working in the trade and even putting them out of business?
My view is that the market has to expand and that who ever comes into it must be doing something different and new to attract new customers or exposure to the diminishing amount of practitioners.
With this in mind, when I was approached by visual artist, Anna Ray, to teach her the skills, I felt this was a good opportunity to take passementerie out of it's perceived remit and see how an artist would respond to these techniques creatively and conceptually. Anna also had a personal reason for wanting to learn, as her ancestors had been Huguenots silk weavers who had settled in the East End and through her research she had discovered one had had a small fancy trimmings factory in Bethnal Green. I felt that wanting to learn the skills of one's ancestors had a certain poetry about it and as my own passementerie journey was being trained in one of the last passementerie Bethnal Green workshops, Wendy Cushing, who in turn had been trained by one of the most famous passementerie companies, Sindals, there was a deep historical resonance.
I felt having an artist using these traditional skills could expose passementerie to a different audience, show its depth of usage and hopefully attract new interest to the discipline as a whole. This could potentially benefit those already working in the trade.
I constructed a training programme that covered the basic skills of both off-the-loom and woven trims. This was broken down into ten sessions and this journey into passementerie took place over the summer. I was awarded a grant by The Heritage Crafts Association from the Endangered Heritage Crafts Fund which enabled me to take the time out financially to teach Anna.
Images show some of the different skills we covered.
The Endangered Heritage Craft Fund is specifically for makers working in the heritage sector. It can be used for many proposals from projects to buying equipment to passing on the skills. The main premise of the fund is to. enable endangered heritage craft practitioners to find ways to help preserve these precious skills.
Thank to Heritage Crafts for all the support with this project.
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