Background to the project Year of the Artist Year of the Artist was a unique national project starting in June 2000 and ran through to May 2001 that celebrated a vital element of UK culture - the Arts, and the Artists who engage directly with our culture through an amazing array of activities. The Year of the Artist project was programmed by each of the ten English Regional Arts Boards, and the overall national promotion of the Year was carried out by Arts2000, with support from the Arts Council of England and the Millennium Festival. Web Warp & Weft With the support of East Midlands Arts and the backing of the trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University, Web writer Helen Whitehead was awarded a grant for Web Warp & Weft. This aimed to explore the ways in which women and men have woven their own stories with yarn and thread, with rugs and quilts and textiles. The website was designed to thread the ideas together and work the threads [stories] into a hypertext with pictures, sound and animation, to create a bigger picture, an overall story. The project was based in Nottingham, which has a particularly notable history of textile creation, including frame-knitting, lacemaking, and more contemporary manufacturing processes. There are surprising and unusual resonances within the creation of what might on the surface seem very different products: both are concerned with frames, print, pattern, layers, colour, nomenclature, technology, narratives, commerce, leisure and much more. The Luddites in Nottinghamshire in the early 19th century rendered stocking-frames unusable as a protest about the terrible treatment of the workers. The industry then was in a difficult state, as it is now. The word "Luddite" has now moved from the textile to the computer industry, becoming a term to describe all those opposed to progress in computer and machine technologies. And most recently the fall of the dot.coms has mirrored the fall of the textile industries... Web Warp & Weft also features a collaboration between Helen Whitehead and East Midlands-based poets Joyce Lambert and Jeremy Duffield, weaving their words into the bright colours of the web. About the artist Helen Whitehead is a writer and editor who has been working with online media since 1985. She explores science & technology, family and spirituality and is particularly interested in writing at the interstices where these themes meet and intertwine. She has led collaborative Web writing projects and has taught Web writing and the Internet to a variety of groups from 6-year-olds to attendees at the Arvon Foundation residential writing courses in Yorkshire, UK. She holds an MA in Writing from The Nottingham Trent University, where she specialised in hypertext fiction on the Web. She is currently website editor and project developer for the trAce Online Writing Centre. "The Web is an innovative new medium for creativity. The boundaries are moving all the time as technology advances, and working on the Web offers new opportunities to interpret traditional arts and crafts and to explore new topics. The crossover of technology and craft in both textile industry and Web should provide opportunities for workers in both areas to learn from one another and develop new resources for creativity."

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©Helen Whitehead 2001 | Web Warp & Weft | Last amended September 2001 | contact helen . whitehead @ ntu . ac . uk