Frankfurt (Main), Univ., Diss., 2009

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis presents a new approach for fabricating free standing structures on flexible substrates using the screen printing technique. The research addresses electronic textile applications and is intended to provide a new method for realising sensors and complex structures on fabrics. Conventional smart fabric fabrication methods, such as weaving and knitting, are only able to achieve planar structures with limited functionality. Packaged discrete sensors can also be attached directly to fabrics but this approach is unreliable and unsuitable for mass production. The reported materials and the fabrication processes enable free standing structures to be formed by printing functional layers directly on top of the fabric. This reduces the fabrication complexity and increases wearer comfort and the flexibility of the fabric. This research details an investigation into sacrificial materials suitable for use on fabrics. A plastic crystalline material (Trimetlylolethane (TME)) was identified as an appropriate sacrificial material because it sublimates which reduces the chance of stiction occurring. A screen printable TME paste has been achieved by dissolving TME powder in a solvent mixture of cyclohexanol (CH) and propylene glycol (PG). The TME sacrificial paste can be cured at 85 oC for 5 minutes providing a solid foundation for subsequent printed layers. This sacrificial layer can be removed in 30 minutes at 150 oC leaving no residue. EFV4/4965 UV curable dielectric material was identified as an appropriate structural material for use with TME. The feasibility of the sacrificial and structural materials has been demonstrated by the fabrication of free standing cantilevers and microfluidic pumps on fabrics and flexible plastic films. Printed cantilevers, with capacitive and piezoelectric sensing mechanisms, have been demonstrated as human motion sensors. A printed microfluidic pump with a maximum pumping rate of 68 μL/min at 3 kHz has also been demonstrated. Both the cantilever and micropump have been demonstrated, for the first time, on fabrics and polyimide substrates, respectively.

An AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award has made collaboration possible between Northumbria University and the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead in providing the opportunity to highlight a significant narrative in craft history. Henry Rothschild, a German émigré, ran the iconic craft outlet Primavera from 1946 to 1980. During this time, he built up an internationally significant collection of ceramics, now housed at the Shipley Art Gallery, along with a personal and business archive. By bringing this inaccessible and underused material to the fore and complementing it with interviews with Rothschild’s contemporaries, connections have emerged that were previously undiscovered. This thesis demonstrated how Rothschild’s position as a retailer, exhibitor and collector marked him as a unique character within the crafts as well as demonstrated the ways in which he utilised his position as an émigré to act outside of the confines of the traditional British standpoint. The narrative of Rothschild has been interwoven into the existing literature on craft in Britain, creating a previously unheard of account of post-war craft. Although Rothschild’s role in the post-war craft world has been remarked upon in a number of texts (Cooper, 2012; Harrod, 1995; Harrod, 1999; Buckley and Hochsherf, 2012) his wide reaching impact and contribution has never been explored in detail. This thesis considered the contradictory nature of Rothschild’s multiple roles and the resulting implications: as a retailer he was motivated to choose pieces that would sell, as an exhibitor he could allow for more creativity and daring in his curatorial choices, and as private collector he enjoyed established relationships with craftspeople. The aim of this thesis was to position Rothschild as collector, exhibitor and retailer not only within the context of British craft, but also to consider how Primavera operated within what David Kynaston calls the ‘justly iconic’ time period from 1945 to 1980 (Kynsaton, 2007). Through both his retail and exhibition activity at Primavera and beyond, craft was given a platform, made accessible to the wider public and influenced taste and fashion. His background as a German Jewish émigré emerged as key to understanding how he negotiated his position within this world. The resulting thesis confirmed and elucidated the significance of Rothschild and Primavera and called for further research into those individuals who are very much of the craft world but not always as producers or educators. As demonstrated here, such examinations have the potential to offer a narrative which is both complementary and challenging to those which dominate, and thereby contribute to the discourse on the nature of narrative based research and craft history.

This dissertation demonstrates that Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Mary Hunter Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1906), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and Mary Wilkins Freemans The Portion of Labor (1903) exemplify the radical politics and aesthetics that late nineteenth-century literary regionalism shares with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Despite considerable feminist critical accomplishments, scholarship on regionalism has yet to relate its rural folkways, feminine aesthetics, and anti-urban stance to similar ideals in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman all depict the challenges of the regional woman artist in order to oppose the uniformity and conventionality of urban modernity. They were not alone in engaging these concerns: they shared these interests with period feminists, sexual radicals, and advocates of the Arts and Crafts Movement like John Ruskin and William Morris, all of whom deeply questioned industrial capitalism and modernization. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman envisioned women’s Arts and Crafts communities that appealed to readers through narratives that detailed the potential uniqueness of homemade decorative arts and other aspects of women’s material culture. For Arts and Crafts advocates and regionalists, handcrafted goods made using local folk methods and natural materials fulfilled what they saw as the aesthetic requirements for artistic self-definition: The Country of the Pointed Firs and The Land of Little Rain embrace the destabilizing effect queer and feminist characters have on a presumably heterosexual domestic environment, and they formally resist the narrative structures of industrial modernity, emphasizing the Arts and Crafts ideal union between woman artist, natural environment, and communal bonds. The Awakening and The Portion of Labor expose the suffocating impact of industrial capitalism and sexism on women artists who strive for connection with their local environments and communities and cannot achieve their creative goals. I prove that all four texts do more than simply interpret regionalism through the Arts and Crafts Movement as a means to launch their critiques of industrial modernity, they transform the meaning of regionalist Arts and Crafts aesthetics and politics in late nineteenth-century American literature.

The work submitted for the PhD by Publication is evidence of my investigation into the significance of textiles as an aesthetic experience within a socially engaged form of material practice, some of which involves other people. Social engagement has been an active and deliberate agent in the aesthetic transformation of functional material objects in two of my publications called The Sleeping Bag Project and You Are the Journey. A third publication is a co-edited book called Outside: Activating Cloth to Enhance the Way We Live. A range of essays by artists, curators and writers discloses previously unwritten commentaries on community initiatives that probe a range of empathetic modes of investigation that explore meaningful spaces for participation. I have come to recognise that a proactive attitude towards collaboration is evident in all three publications. It is exemplified by my approach to co-orchestrating the Outside book and by an eagerness to work with others to advance the concept of the transformative power of cloth within the live arena for socially engaged textile practices today. The relations between an aesthetic transformation and socially engaged practice was implicit in Rozsika Parker’s seminal text The Subversive Stitch first published in 1984 providing an analysis of textiles within social history. At the beginning of work on this PhD my relationship with the book was complex and full of tensions. My perceptions of Parker’s work changed as I discovered at the very end of my thesis connections between her work and mine that enable a deeper understanding of the need in my socially engaged textile practice today for the kind of aesthetics she describes historically as arising from social constraint. Consequently The Subversive Stitch has now re-appeared with value as a touchstone for my work in a contemporary context. The thesis then discusses examples of the outcomes of practices by other artists and considers the attention given to visual aesthetics within socially engaged practices. Ideas are developed to suggest how the aesthetic dimension of textiles may enhance principles of communal giving as an innovative strategy stretching beyond the coalition government’s Big Society agenda presented in 2010. Examples from investigations of textiles in museum archives including embroideries created by internees within Second World War prisoner-ofwar camps in the Far East are also examined. The aesthetic dimension of the embroideries carries significance through the vulnerable context in which they were created, as a potent series of statements involving cloth in action. In contemporary Britain, I have shown how such everyday objects as sleeping bags and travel tickets can capture the imagination by creating a connection with participants, when they may not have been consciously seeking an insight separate from the functionality of these objects. Nevertheless, an aesthetic gesture is surreptitiously tucked away. This has created a hybrid form of social engagement that can move fluidly between private and public spaces. The social engagement also involves processes of interaction and exchange with the object in the presentation of an active relationship with the object that is both seen and unseen.

Das an Kostbarkeiten reiche Dresdner Kupferstich‐Kabinett verwahrt in seinem Bestand auch ein außergewöhnliches Konvolut von Vestiarien zu Dresdner Opernaufführungen. Unter ihnen stellt der prächtig in rotes Leder eingebundene Band „L’Olimpiade“ wiederum eine kleine Preziose dar.

Long-chain alkylbenzenes are industrially synthesized precursors to commercial surfactants such as laundry detergent. The process of benzene alkylation currently utilizes homogeneous acidic catalysts (HF, AlCl3, etc.), which cause a multitude of problems such as production of toxic waste, hazards to workers, and corrosion of expensive industrial equipment. These problems can be avoided by the use of heterogeneous highly acidic catalysts. Solid catalysts do not corrode equipment and are relatively simple to remove from the post-reaction mixture. Phosphotungstic acid (PTA) supported on silica gel could be a possible catalyst due to its high acidity with an estimated pKa ≈ -13. However, it is soluble in many solvents and can be leached from silica gel during the process. The objective of this research is to obtain a superacidic stable heterogeneous catalyst containing covalently immobilized PTA, and evaluate its activity and stability in the alkylation of benzene by long-chain alkenes. The catalyst PTA/SiO2 was prepared via the sol-gel method by co-condensation of PTA with tetraethoxysilane in acidic media. Surfactant Pluronic P123 was used as a template to form porous structure. Then the catalyst was granulated to prevent caking of the powder during reaction. For granulation, the powder PTA/SiO2 was mixed with aluminum oxide (an inert adhesive agent) and pressured at 7 t to make tablets. The tablets were converted to granules of 1-2 mm diameter and calcined at 400 °C to remove moisture. FT-IR spectra confirmed the presence of PTA in the obtained material. Analysis by atomic absorption spectroscopy showed PTA contents of 0.027 mmol/g. The catalyst was mesoporous with BET surface area of 168 m2/g and mean particle size of 856 nm. The reaction of alkylation of benzene by octene-1 and decene-1 was carried out in a fixed bed flow reactor at 200-250 °C where mixtures of benzene and an alkene flowed through the catalyst with constant rate. Products were collected and analyzed on a GC chromatograph. The catalyst demonstrated good catalytic activity at temperatures above 200 °C. In all experiments mixtures of isomeric alkylbenzenes were obtained with 2-phenylalkanes as main products. Decreasing of flow rate and ratio alkene:benzene favored conversion of alkenes. Characterization of the catalyst after the reaction showed little changes in porosity and particle size. No leaching of PTA was observed. However, carbon deposits were found on the catalyst that requires regeneration before next use in catalysis.

Textile waste, both pre and post consumer, is a problem that needs a solution, and fast. This work aims to find a simple solution to that problem, to exemplify how a small change in thinking and structures can make a big difference. The proposal is a design system of square construction, with roots in historical fabric conservancy practices and by use of salvage craft techniques. By constructing garments out of squares, waste is eliminated by simple means and existing materials of different qualities can be cut in the same way, thereby rationalized, then assembled into larger materials and so an up cycling process is achieved. The result of this work is a versatile design system which may lead to many different outcomes in the hands of different designers without compromising on desired fit and without the waste generated from cutting conventionally. In the present fashion field solutions such as this system are necessary to encourage the apprehensive designer to take steps towards sustainable practices.