Jessica Hemmings
Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA (Honors) in 1999 and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, earning an MA (Distinction) in 2000. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, is published by kalliope paperbacks under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (2008). She has taught at Central Saint Martins, Rhode Island School of Design, Winchester School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art. In 2010 she edited a collection of essays titled In the Loop: Knitting Now published by Black Dog and in 2012 edited The Textile Reader (Berg) and wrote Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury). Her editorial and curatorial project, Cultural Threads, is a book about postcolonial thinking and contemporary textile practice (Bloomsbury: 2015) accompanied by a travelling exhibition Migrations (2015-2017). From 2012-2016 Jessica was Professor of Visual Culture and Head of the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. She is currently Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand), University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the 2020-2023 Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture, the Netherlands.
With Kristina Hagström-Ståhl and Jyoti Mistry, Jessica co-edited Intersections, issue 11 of the PARSE journal (2020). Recent journal publications include “Maximum Space Around the Typewriter: Yvonne Vera and the craft of writing” in Wasifiri: International Contemporary Writing (forthcoming 2021); “A Dialogue about Social Weaving: The Weaving Kiosk and Weaving Lab” co-authored with Marianne Fairbanks and Rosa Tolnov Clausen in TEXTILE (2021); “How Do You Footnote a Smile? One Dialog about Two Extremes of Textile Research” co-authored with Birgitta Nordström in TEXTILE (2020) and “Rereading & revising: the (sometimes) smallness of craft” in the Journal of Craft Research (2018).