Posts relating to Karen’s Centenary celebrations
Posted byAlan Cohen
Last year we announced that we would be marking Karen’s centenary on May 8 2021 by publishing new material on the site. We haven’t published as much as we would have liked but the arrival of what would have been Karen’s 101st has acted as a spur. We are pleased to draw attention to: We…
Posted byKatrina Finch
Guest Post Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen, Guest scholar at The Centre for Textile Research, University of Copenhagen. Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen is trained as a crafts teacher with weaving as her main subject and as an ethnographer and social anthropologist at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She has curated large exhibitions and has published extensively about historical…
Posted byPhilip Sykas
As important as healds and reeds are to the weaving process, little has been documented about their history or production. Alfred Barlow cursorily encapsulated the developments in heald making: ‘Healds were formerly made by hand by means of a reel, &c., and many are still formed so. […] Heald-making machines are often of very complicated…
Posted byKatrina Finch
Guest Post Tina Sinding Møller Dam, Karen’s niece In many ways my auntie Karen was like a female Peter Pan. Very modern and with the capacity for seizing the right moment in her own very visionary, clever way. What she believed in, she aimed for, and turned into reality. And like Peter Pan her arena…
Posted byKatrina Finch
Guest Post James Bulman-May, Karen’s nephew The warp and woof On the 100th birthday of my aunt Karen Finch née Sinding Møller, I would like to honour her achievements and independent spirit. I was fortunate to have Aunt Karen in London, and more so because she shared her home with family and friends. To me,…
Posted byKatrina Finch
Birthday greetings To: Karen; Alan; Ellen-May and Ayesha (who is celebrating her 40th birthday) 8th May is a magical date in our family calendar, believing as we do that sharing a birthday date confers a special relationship between people and families. Despite not being with us, Karen remains at the heart of this day of…
Posted byAlan Cohen
Karen’s vision of textile conservation always had a very strong international dimension. As part of Karen’s Centenary, we are publishing an interactive map showing the global reach of Karen’s teaching at the Textile Conservation Centre. The map shows the country of origin of many of her students, and provides some information about their later careers….
Posted byJoshua Cohen
My mormor (mother’s mother in Danish) would have been 100 years old today. How she would have loved to get a letter from the Queen on her birthday! We joked about it many times, especially after she turned 90. She knew that she and I held very different views about the royal family and that…
Posted byKatrina Finch
It was just by chance in 2017 that I came across a reference to the Oral History Project of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation (FAIC) in an issue of the IIC’s (International Institute for Conservation) journal. It mentioned undertaking an oral history with Karen. Dr Joyce Hill Stoner was mentioned as leading…
Guest Post Kirstie Buckland I think I first met Karen Finch in 1975 when she invited the Costume Society into Hampton Palace to her recently moved Textile Conservation Centre. She was conserving a Grenadier cap and I was the only member who recognised what it was. We struck up a friendship, it was so easy…
Posted byKatrina Finch
Guest Post Ruth Sinding My sister would have been a hundred years old, had she still lived on May the 8th 2021. She was born at our farm in Jutland, Meldgaard, situated near a village, Rødding, to the north east of Viborg. She was the eldest of eight children and a beautiful child. My father…
When Karen came to live with us in Bisterne Avenue in 2004, she was still fairly mobile despite very severe arthritic pains in her back and hips. In those early days, it was not unknown for her to pick up her crutches and walk on her own round the block – no mean enterprise considering…