@Meter Room Coventry
Ribbons and Wheels
Ribbon weaving was Coventry's main industry from the early 1700s to the 1860s. During this period about half its population made a living from ribbon weaving and Coventry was the main centre of ribbon production in England.
When the industrial revolution introduced mechanised looms into an industry based on traditional weaving skills, ribbon making declined and Coventry began to reinvent itself as the centre of the British cycle industry until, at the end of the 1890s, the Daimler company started to build cars.
Archive material at the Herbert Museum is presented in folders bound by woven ribbons - achival tape. Work made @Meter Room is informed by both the archive and the archive binding, and by found objects (including 2 bycycle wheels and a metal door grill) which were wrapped up, or tied with ribbon.
The Point was an iconic building in the Centre of Coventry, a splendid Brutalist,1969 built, concrete,13 storey tower in two parts joined by glass walkways. It was demolished at the end of the summer, 2020. Rubble from the final days of the demolition was collected, documented, wrapped and tied. Emptied, the paper wrappings and woven ribbons are an archive of (a tiny part of) the absent building, and the pile of rubble an unlikely, fragmented, monument to the unstoppable and seemingly endless rebuilding of Coventry.
A bound bicycle wheel was tied to the gates and fences of the demolition site, and the gates tied together before the construction workers arrived for the day.
