A01=Lisa Taylor
Art methodologies
Art of the local
Author_Lisa Taylor
carpet industry
Category=AFW
Category=JHBC
Category=KJZ
Category=NHTK
Corporeal nostalgia
Deindustrialisation
Depleted social infrastructure
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Firths Carpets Limited
Gendered labour
Left-behind places
Levelling-Up
Northern England
Re-making community
Yorkshire
Product details
- ISBN 9781526166418
- Weight: 441g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jul 2025
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company’s archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women’s labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets. Drawing on the author’s personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.
Lisa Taylor is Reader in Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University
