Jools Gilson

Jools Gilson is a Cork-based dance artist who has been making professional work for dance/theatre venues, galleries and broadcast radio for 30 years. Her practice is knotted, knitted and woven between the disciplines of dance theatre, writing and textiles and comprises choreographies linked to ancient bog bodies and their textiles, 30,000 sewing needles hung from a gallery ceiling and stories about wars waged through embroidery. Recent awards include an Arts Council Dance Bursary and a Science Foundation Ireland (Insight) Seed Award. Her publications include Textiles, Community & Controversy: The Knitting Map (ed. Jools Gilson and Nicola Moffat, Bloomsbury, 2019), and “Navigation, Nuance and half/angel’s Knitting Map”, in The Textile Reader (second edition, ed. Jessica Hemmings, Bloomsbury, 2023). The Knitting Map (2005) has been exhibited as part of the “Mapping Climate Change” exhibition at the Wriston Art Galleries (Wisconsin, US) in 2023, and in the Berman Museum of Art (Pennsylvania, US) in 2021. Gilson is interested in the grain and potentiality of embodied textile practices to incisively re-think a contemporary poetics of femininity and environment. In her work, textiles are powerfully performative, as they inscribe gestures of revolutionary craftiness as well as the stunning spaceplace of female and Irish historicity. She is Professor of Creative Practice at University College Cork in Ireland.