The Art and Science of Linen
Linen is traced through flax, bacteria, labour, and industrial process in this single-channel video, showing the material as a living cultural system.
Alex May developed The Art and Science of Linen with Anna Dumitriu and microbiologist Dr John Paul as a single-channel video about the full ecology of linen production. The work moves from flax flowers and antique textiles to retting tanks, factory methods, and the beneficial bacteria that help separate fibre from stem. Rather than treating linen as a finished material, the video shows it as something shaped by microbial action, labour, industry, and cultural memory.
What matters is the video’s ability to hold together different kinds of process without separating them into neat categories. Plant growth, microbial action, manual labour, and industrial method appear as one entangled material history. That use of moving image as a container for layered, partly hidden systems sits close to May’s ongoing concern with recording, preservation, and what remains overlooked inside familiar things.
Additional notes
- Created in 2011 with Anna Dumitriu and microbiologist Dr John Paul.
- Sound by Martin A. Smith.
- Includes footage recorded at the Irish Linen Centre and Lisburn Museum and McConville’s Flax Mill and Museum.
- Inspired in part by Sergei Winogradsky’s writing on the retting of flax and the role of Clostridium pasteurianum.
- Format: single-channel digital video with stereo soundtrack, 1920 x 1080.
- First exhibited at the Irish Linen Centre and Lisburn Museum and R-Space Gallery in Northern Ireland in 2011.
- Held in the permanent collection of the Irish Linen Centre and Lisburn Museum.
- Later shown in contexts including Gone Viral: Medical Science and Contemporary Textile Art, Design Matters, BioArt and Bacteria, From the Field, and BioArt Alchemy.
- Video documentation: Vimeo