Lady Ludd researches and explores how to repurpose and create new ‘tools’ for ‘performance’, which centres around wider histories of women* and non-binary people’s work and activism in textile production across weave, lace and knit and its connection to creative and technological developments.
Lady Ludd specifically focuses on a feminist and queer reframing of the Luddite movement, which originated in the East Midlands during the 19th Century. The Luddites objected to the rising implementation of automated textile equipment which threatened their livelihoods and Luddites destroyed machines ‘hurtful to commonality’, their protest was not against the machines, but their employers who sought to use these tools to displace workers.
The Luddites had a collective identity such as King Ludd. An overlooked collective identity within the movement was Lady Ludd – historically Lady Ludd was of many genders and taking on this mantle consciously explored gender performance and fluidity for a range of aims, many in relation to direct action.
Antique Loom Performance as part of Sonic Sculptures
The project resulted in the augmenting of a four shaft loom donated by the Framework Knitters Museum and collaborating with Dr. Juan Martinez Avila at the Mixed Reality Lab at The University of Nottingham, to repurpose the loom – a tool of predominantly historic feminised labour – into a musical instrument. As a form of creative and feminist technological resistance in the age of AI-based automation and shed light on how women and queer people have had to poetically “reclaim, rearrange, repurpose and rebirth” (Legacy Russell) the tools and technologies accessible to them towards strategic disruption and refusal.
Alongside this, Nottingham based maker Rosie Deegan was commissioned to design a new stand for the loom and weavers from the Notts District of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers were commissioned to design and weave a fabric for a new costume which Lady Ludd will perform in and take on tour.
Through reframing these narratives, Lady Ludd aims to build new understandings of Luddism in order to collectively manifest a contemporary intersectional feminist Luddism for now and in the future, and to question how technology is implemented and for whom.
*when we say women this always includes trans women
Artist and Composer: Sophie Huckfield
Creative Producer: Lee Nicholls (Near Now)
Music Technologist: Dr Juan Martinez Avila
Loom Stand: Rosie Deegan
Costume Weavers: Sarah Cooke and Ann Seals
Costume Design and Fabrication: Molly Bonnell
Stage Design and Fabrication: Sophie Huckfield and Tim Hattrick
Upcoming Lady Ludd Showcasings
- OUTPOST Gallery |Norwich| 6 - 28 September
Previous Lady Ludd Showcasings
- Sonic Sculptures 2 |Broadway Gallery, Nottingham| 20 July 2024
About Sophie Huckfield
Birmingham/London-based Sophie Huckfield (she/they) is an artist. Her practice draws on contemporary research and histories related to technology, labour, craft, social-class and industrialisation. She incorporates layering and cutting as a conceptual tool to reframe these complex socio-political histories, to develop multidisciplinary works which reimagine and reconfigure ‘production’ contexts and challenge the dominant narratives employed to frame specific stories, histories and experiences. Her practice aims to re-purpose the tools and technologies of production, both materially and culturally, to make space for redefining how we produce values, relations and traditions which are in turn embedded into the objects and stories we make.