Alaya Ang
The Fingers Pulling The Thread
Edinburgh Arts Festival 2024, City Art CentreA floor-based textile piece, The Fingers Pulling the Thread is a meditation on rivers as carriers of histories, migration, and industry.
The work features textiles dyed using mud and soil, drawing from a dyeing technique from Guangdong, where my matrilineal lineage can be traced. Cantonese migrants carried mud-dyed clothing as a way to hold onto the land they left behind, when they traveled to Southeast Asia.
Sewn into the fabric are river patterns that speak to my family name, 洪 (Ang), which signifies “flood” and “vast waters.” The name originates from communities who lived along rivers and lakes, developing expertise in flood control and irrigation, an ancestral connection to water as both a life-giving and precarious force.
Calico, gambiered silk, cotton, river esk mud, soil and shale rock, rice field mud, ceriops tagal, jackfruit heartwood, fire flame bush, oak gallnut powder, symplocos cochinchinensis leaf powder, pu’er tea, soy milk, florida water, cotton and polyester thread, LED tube lights
Patterns are embroidered onto joss paper, traditionally used in ancestral worship as spirit money.
In a traditional funeral ceremony, burning spirit money is the final act performed by a family member, ensuring a smooth crossing into the afterlife. This acts as an offering that, like water, serves as a passage between worlds.
Interwoven with the textiles is a collection of sounds recorded on site at my family’s tailoring shop
These sonic elements reflect the unseen labour of garment-making and the transmission of knowledge through touch, repetition, and rhythm. Special thanks to Meg Jenkins for sound design
Participative Archiving
As part of the exhibition, audience were invited to contribute to the work by drawing or sewing patterns onto the fabric.
They were invited to map a terrain, a fracture pattern, a timeline, or a water channel.
This open-ended engagement allowed for the accumulation of marks and interventions, positioning the work as a living archive that continues to evolve. By foregrounding participation, the work resists fixed historical narratives, instead centering fluid, co-authored ways of knowing and remembering.
These gestures created a collective palimpsest of movement and memory, layering personal and ecological narratives onto the cloth.
photo by Sally Jubb courtesy of Edinburgh Arts Festival
Working with Migrant Women’s Group
a four-session collaboration with SCOREScotland Women’s Sewing Group, we extended the exhibited textile work through collective sewing, making and conversation, allowing the exhibition to become a living, evolving space shaped by the women’s skills, stories and labour. See more for workshops
This work is the second part of a longer-term project The Sea, the Heat, The Rope and The Fingers Pulling the Thread, a series of work that investigates matrilineal and genderqueer genealogies. Each cumulative form is an invitation to relationality by meandering through different material discoveries and processes.