Interview with Angela Maddock

Abstract

This interview with Angela Maddock explores well-making in the context of her own textile arts practice, teaching and research. Describing well-making as a potentially transformative act of making, both physically and psychologically, Maddock associates it with processes of contributing, building, attaching and connecting – enabling agencies and affects that bring people and things together. Projects range from the knitted performance piece Bloodline, which she co-made with her mother, and quilts made collaboratively with midwifery students from their own repurposed underwear. Maddock’s work ranges from public commissions to informal domestic pieces made for herself, friends and family, but she is always attuned to the memories and meanings embodied in the materiality of fabric. Knitting, trauma, family, feminism and subjectivity are themes that run throughout Maddock’s work which includes unmaking as much as making, disassembly and repurposing, in a process of remaking the self as much as the stuff of everyday life.