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. This practice is deeply rooted in the movement of people across riverine and maritime networks, reflecting how material traditions travel and adapt across generations and geographies.
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. In Southeast Asia, Cantonese migrants carried mud-dyed clothing as a way to hold onto the land they left behind, embedding their journeys into cloth. This resonates with Nanyang Chinese who traveled across the maritime regions of the South China Sea, where textiles became vessels of memory, carrying stories of migration, adaptation, and belonging.
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
Mud-Dyeing
Wearing mud-dyed clothing is significant for Cantonese people, especially those who have left their homes, as a way to carry a piece of the land with them. The clothing acts as a vessel of memory embodying the landscapes, stories, and journeys of its people.
Two of these textiles have been dyed with soil collected from the River Esk near Ironmills Park and the Shale Bings in West Lothian, sites marked by Scotland’s industrial past. The presence of iron oxides and metal runoff from historical mining reveals another intricate relationship present, between industry and river ecosystems, echoing the environmental transformations as these residues persist in the land and water, shaping how people engage with the place.
River patterns sewn into the fabric provides insight to the artist’s family name 洪 (Ang), that signifies "flood" or "vast waters,"
Guidance (The Way of an Ancestor) traces diverted paths, lingering imprints, and afterlives, honouring Alaya’s grandmother and uncle. The patterns are embroidered onto joss paper, traditionally used in ancestral worship as spirit money—an offering that, like water, serves as a passage between worlds. In a traditional funeral ceremony, burning spirit money is the final act performed by a family member, ensuring a smooth crossing into the afterlife. Like the ebb and flow of water, this ritual carries memory across generations, shaping the unseen currents of ancestral connection.
Interwoven with the textiles is a collection of sounds—cutting, sewing machines at work, the everyday interchanges of my family, who are tailors. These sonic elements reflect the unseen labour of garment-making and the transmission of knowledge through touch, repetition, and rhythm. The act of sewing threads together histories of trade, migration, and adaptation, where textiles carry the imprints of movement and time. Special thanks to Meg Jenkins for sound design
As part of a participative archiving process, audience members were invited to contribute to the work by drawing or sewing patterns onto the fabric, mapping a terrain, a fracture pattern, a timeline, or a water channel.
These gestures created a collective palimpsest of movement and memory, layering personal and ecological narratives onto the cloth. 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.
A collaborative workshop with SCOREscotland women’s group to contribute to the creation process, sharing their skills and stories, also became part of the material narrative. This became an integral part of the creation process where the women contributed their skills and stories, weaving their lived experiences onto fabric. Through sewing and storytelling, the workshop fostered a space for exchange and their contributions became embedded in the work shaped by the multiple hands and voices.
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.