I saw an orange insect stepping lightly

‘I saw an orange insect stepping lightly’ was created while I was taking part in the Through the Surface: Collaborating Textile Artists from Britain and Japan project. In the article for Surface Design Journal called ‘Threadbare Beauty: Worn Away Patterns’ Jessica Hemmings discusses the work in relation to other artists and designers that have taken up the challenge of making wear-and-tear an attribute. “As part of Through the Surface, a collaborative exchange project between Japanese and British textile artists set up by Lesley Millar of the University College of the Creative Arts in 2003, Claire Barber was one of a group of British textile artists to travel to Japan to create a body of work in response to the exchange. One of the installations she constructed while there was situated on the stone steps leading to the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine in Kyoto. “I became interested in surfaces that had been weathered or changed,” Barber explains of the installation that began when she noticed the absence of moss from the worn centres of each stone step. Wanting to “touch the space lightly” Barber inserted her own carpet of pins into the moss at the edge of each step. Every pinhead was removed and the remaining metal painted with an orange tip that both echoed the orange gates of the temple’s entrance, but also created the allusion of small dashes of colour hovering protectively above the moss. “A linear mark”, Barber explains, was all she wanted to leave on this foreign landscape. The gesture marked out the tangible trace of human movement, but also offered an eloquent reminder of the fragility of everything – including stone – that is built by mankind.”