Haydeh Changizian
“I don't think there's ever been a week when I haven't
either painted, carved, or done something in all the years.”
Master puppeteer Lyndie Wright has been designing puppets and bringing them to life since her early childhood. Despite growing up in a home without art, Lyndie and her sister still nurtured their creativity, using any materials they could find to paint, craft, and, in Lyndie’s case, fashion little string puppets, crafting miniature papier-mache heads at home. At the end of her art school training, Lyndie stumbled across the work of puppeteer John Wright, who was touring through Pretoria, Lyndie’s hometown in South Africa at the time. In true ‘Lyndie’ style, she asked for a job and, one month later, was made a member of the touring company.
After moving to England in 1957, Lyndie attended the Central School of Art as a painter before going on to found the renowned Little Angel Theatre in 1961 with her now husband, John Wright. Living in the cottage next door to the Islington-based theatre, they began redefining British puppetry. They hosted shows next door (the commute to the theatre being mere minutes), ran the box office, toured in the van with young children in tow, mentored upcoming artists who then often joined the company, and both watched and hosted countless shows.
Lyndie Wright’s workshop remains a hive of daily activity, as her profound love for her craft makes the thought of stopping unthinkable. ‘What would I do if I stopped?’ she says ‘I love what I do.’
Growing up surrounded by creativity, Lyndie Wright’s children followed in her footsteps, pursuing successful creative careers of their own; Sarah Wright is a puppeteer, puppet director and the founder of the Curious School of Puppetry, and Joe Wright, a renowned director of films including Pride and Prejudice (2005); Atonement (2007); Anna Karenina (2012); and Darkest Hour (2017).
Celia Pym clip
Celia Pym in conversation with Freddie Robbins
The Start of Celia & Freddie’s Friendship
Celia: I had studied in the US between 1997 and 2001, then I went to Japan for a full year, from 2001 to 2002. When I came back from Japan, I got a teaching degree. I loved it. I was teaching part-time in North London. I had a job that meant I could pay my rent. Things were working out.
And then Freddie got in touch. I had a studio in the Bow Arts Trust. Freddie said, “I'm doing this show called Knit Two Together, and we've heard about your knitting project.”
Freddie: I co-curated it with Katie Bevin, whom Celia and I have since done quite a lot of things with.
The Crafts Council just wanted us to make sure we'd really found as many different artists as possible, because obviously, your own networks are limited. I'm not a curator.
I've curated quite a few shows, and this was a fantastic show to do. I think it was relatively late that you came on the scene, but that was fantastic because you offered something really other to the exhibition. We didn't show any functional things. That was something I was pushing for really hard.
Celia: It was like a popular show, which was also something that was interesting to me because I think I was in my early twenties. It had this massive breadth of reach, and suddenly, it gave me a different respect for some of the skills I had learned.
I'd learned knitting from my home experiences, from my mum's friend Mary Etling, who was an incredible knitter, who had come round and knit with us. That show was huge.
I do think about knitting as growth sometimes. You can knit small bits, or you can knit ambitious big things on a machine, but you can also just make something quickly and be done and then you move on to the next. But cumulatively, they add up to this bigger thing.
The Imperfect
Freddie: I call this project The Perfect, because the machine was designed to produce perfect garments. It’s a perfect system because there's no waste of yarn. Because the whole garment comes off the machine as one, nothing's cut and sewn.
Celia: Then we called this one The Imperfect. It suited us as a partnership, because you were striving or interested in this kind of perfection. All I could look for were the imperfections.
Celia: I was also really questioning whether that was actually desirable. In terms of this knitting machinery, how desirable the industry wants things to be perfect in and in repetition, like you are talking about with the sweaters. They're desperate for it.
But is that what people really want?
I don't think that people really want to look exactly the same as each other. I'm interested in this kind of notion of perfection as actually being something undesirable and unattainable, and actually a really damaging thing to try and attain.
We're asked so much to be perfect in our physicality, be perfect in our health, be perfect in our behaviour. And it's impossible because humans are very imperfect. We're very unforgiving people. Yes.
Freddie: I love that so much that the digital can only replicate what we’re giving it.
Celia: Even AI. It has the same sort of greediness and wrongness and cruelty that we have.
Freddie: The more you digitise something, the more you automate it, the less flexibility there is, the more you have to explore the tension. It gets it when you are hand-knitting, as you can manage each stitch separately. You can knit with more or less anything you can bear to knit with.
But the automated machines are very sensitive. We just say no. Or you stop. What the machine does, when it gets to a certain area, it's like, “No, I've had enough of this. I'm not going to run this through. It's too tight, it's too heavy, it's too much.” Or the yarn may have a defect in it, and then it drops the stitch.
Celia: What we're experiencing with our Waste Yarn Project blankets is that because of the age of some of the yarns, they’re snapping. It’s colours like that brown that are constantly snapping.
Freddie: I think it's also often to do with the dyeing of a yarn in a different way. I love the way that yarn has a lifespan, too. Like human beings, it gets old and tired.
Celia: And then it's idiosyncratic. It may never have been great from the beginning as well. It gets old and tired and brittle and breaks.
Freddie: I love that about cloth. You can fold it up relatively small and then unfurl it, and it can suddenly occupy loads of space.
Celia: It’s magical like that.
I'm just so taken with seeing [these bodies] again. I love them like this on the two tables.
I've always thought these two bodies have a bit more… not to insult the others, but a bit more personality.
Freddie: Definitely. They're more one of a kind because they're the first ones that got made. They're mistaken ones, whereas the others did come out a bit more uniform. These were the test books, and these also have that tension between the hand work and the flat machine work. They definitely do have a really different personality.
Celia: But Freddie, you had that issue, and you did the show at Applied Arts. You said, “I don’t know what I could do. There are so many possibilities.”. You just kept knitting them.
Freddie: I probably had about 30, and some were joined together in this really large work where they're all holding hands, and I put together a bit like paper dolls.
Celia: But I love them super floppy like this.
Freddie: I do too. That's why I developed that piece where they're so like paper dolls; they have no structure, and they just flop.
Celia: I also love that yellow thread and all these unfinished bits.
Freddie: The yellow strip was about me trying to…
Celia: Were you trying to straighten the legs?
Freddie: I was trying to do something technical. I can't remember what now. Look how uneven they are. These were early ones where there had been technical problems, which is why there were holes and Celia down them. I must have been trying to measure something or trying to work something out that wasn't quite right.
Celia: So, you would’ve done this after it came off the machine, right?
Freddie: Yeah. I put that through, threaded that thread through.
Celia:. It was funny as well because up until this point, it had all been clothes, and I’d been mending, and you said, “Well, what about this?”
I couldn't get my hand inside them. These imperfections were in the places that people grazed themselves, like the knee, the messy cuff, which has been worn down and rubbed. These ones not so much, but I definitely remember doing that knee and feeling very tenderly towards this body.
Freddie: Well, obviously, in the way the machine works, it was obviously more problematic on the extremities, like the arms and legs, while the solid centre seems to be okay.
Celia: It's like you've got two partners on this project. Not you and me. I mean the technician and the machine.
Because there's convincing the technician that what you want to do is, in fact, what you want to do. Not that you're not listening to their experience and you're not interested in what their knowledge is or what they can offer you, but you are also trying to persuade them to go against their instincts.
Freddie: And to go against their training.
Celia: Also, they're trying not to damage the machine, so they're playing caretaker of the machine and not trying to let anything bad happen.
KEEP READING
Unseen Textiles
I'm not a printed textile person. The bit that I like about textiles is the construction.
Celia: So within textiles, often you talk about print, you talk about weave, you talk about knit, you talk about embroidery. People and studies are sometimes divided up along those categories, so sometimes, the world understands things in those ways.
But the way I've always thought about textiles is that there are constructed textiles and there are surface textiles. The construction is what is most exciting to me. I think the boundarylessness then comes in because once you can construct it, it can be anything depending on the weight of the thread or whatever you are in the manner in which you're constructing it.
It can be anything, but the principle that structure that you're applying, the structure of the loop or the structure of the woven thing or the connection of the embroidered stitch, means you can make it wherever you want.
But probably, the way it exists in the world as well is probably important, though it doesn't cross my mind as much. Because textiles exist in nomadic cultures, as the walls of a felted tent or in our lives as our sweaters or as a knitted body.
We are so familiar with textiles. Most of us, because we wear it, because it's under our feet, or because it's the dish cloth. When you dry your hands or the upholstery in the car that you sit in or on the tube, we don't even question how we know it. But it also means it can be everywhere in any way that you want.
Freddie: It’s visible, but often unseen.
Celia: That's a nice way of describing it. You always get the succinct.
Freddie: I've always been intrigued about why textiles are all lumped together.
Because it feels to me that if you are, if you are putting an image on top of textiles–you might be printing an image–that to me has very little relationship to constructing something. That's akin to print making or painting, where you have a surface and you put something on it, as opposed to starting with material and making something. Sometimes, I think that they don't belong together.
It's interesting how sculpture isn't material-focused. It's structure-focused. A 3D thing. Whereas textiles are always just lumped together as textiles. I don't necessarily think people are in it for the same reasons.
I can't do 2D. I even struggle with drawing. It's so flat, isn't it? It's just on the surface. I want to turn the page over or see the back of it. I really love conducting materials. Drawing is so difficult and flat, unforgiving. Then you turn the page, and it's a white piece of paper, or a computer screen.
Celia: Conducting materials is a really nice expression. You do get your words out well, Freddie.
Freddie: Oh, you're so kind.
I suppose I think a lot about how you can talk about what you do without saying, “Oh, it's knitting or it's textiles.”
And I love the way that the needles are like wands, or like a conductor's battle.
Celia: I'm trying to knit a cable at the moment. It pleases me that that line becomes that solid mass.
Thinking about these newspaper rugs, I am really attracted to the line becoming a form. Which essentially a lot of the time is what's happening. Whether the line is a fat, chunky line or a fine, fine filigree, horse hair, they make it slowly with all this accumulation of the loops or the weaves, and they take shape. That always thrills me.
One day, I'd love to do a project where I just knit everything I've got. You know, take a year and just make it all into…
Freddie: God, you're getting knit fast.
Celia: Yeah, I know.
Finger Magic
Freddie: I really love the idea that you can unravel what you've done. Although I never do. But I like that it's there.
Celia: When I started working with paper, the jeopardy was if you made a hole. You rip it. Whereas the knitted mark can go backwards and forwards.
I can even trim the stitched mark if I've got a pair of scissors. I can unpick it and reuse that, and I quite like that material. I always love when you unravel knitting, how it's got the kink. It's like the life of its structure.
Freddie: I really love the idea that you can unravel what you've done. Although I never do. But I like that it's there.
Celia: I have never thought about risk in terms of my own work.
I think about when things don't work or when trying something new feels risky. Maybe doing a residency somewhere or embarking on a project.
Freddie: But you have done things where you get other people's things, and you have to repair them, and it can go wrong. Is that not a risk there because their expectation might be different to what you deliver?
Celia: Yeah, very. Or they're just the kind of person who isn't going to be happy that there's a problem that isn't going to be solved. They think their life is going to be better. I've always been attracted to that.
I'm always curious about how people can express their frustration and or, or the difficulties of talking about your own life and then you've got this sweater with a hole in it that offers an opportunity to talk about those things.
And then maybe the hole doesn't fix it, but that's also fine.And they can be annoyed with me if they want to
I don't love the feeling of having people annoyed at me.
Freddie: No, me neither
Celia: But I don't mind it. It's not that I'm looking to be a punching bag or anything, but it makes me laugh or curious that someone has an expectation that an amended hole might make them feel better. And then I do it and it's still not right. This to me is a really funny interaction. I've taken ages to figure out the negotiation of what my boundaries are when I'm mending things for other people.
I understand the limits of what I can do in this. So in that mending role, in that act of care, you are boundaried. I have had to learn to do that.
Freddie: But they’re your boundaries, not someone's boundaries.
Celia: I wouldn't recognise or try to say to someone, “This thing has moved me”, or “Doing this job was really rewarding.”
Freddie: And you never say to someone, “I really think you should give up on this sweater and just go to a therapist”?
Celia: Never.
I just think there are so many opportunities where I have all these odd encounters with people through their clothes. I think it’s possible that this person's never spoken about this weirdness before. They just told me, and I get to hold that for a little bit.
I really put myself in role. I am Celia, but I'm the mender.
The reason it's not impossible to do is because I'm curious about them, but I'm not burdened by their confession or what they tell me.
Freddie: And it's not a lifelong relationship.
Celia: No, so I can hold it for that moment in time. Then I can mend the thing, and I can have this funny encounter where I'm looking at the garment and thinking, “God, who did this? How did this fit them?”
Or it really doesn't suit, and then you can give it back to them. Hopefully, the good bit is when it goes well and they're surprised by what they see and say, “This is really what I was hoping for.” Or, “I didn't know what I was hoping for, but I love this.” People often say, “I could never do that.”
You have some kind of skill or finger magic that can make this finger magic. Then I feel really good–I can do things for my people.
Celia: But it’s also the challenges around display. I remember you and I talked about how if you use a coat hanger or anything that references what people usually associate with clothing, you immediately think you might be in a shop or in your wardrobe.
Then you think, I want to touch it or put it on. People can't get away from it being just something functional that they love and wear.
Freddie: I’ve tried not to have them in relationship to the body, because knitting is always seen in relationship to the body, and I would not want to do functional things.
For quite a long time, people kept asking you to do functional things. I don't want to do that. You ask me to make a sweater, and I could, but that's not what I want to spend my time doing. Get someone who makes sweaters to make you a sweater.
BECOME PART OF HAYDEH’S STORY
Haydeh Changizian Museum, founded by Haydeh in 2022, is housed in a beautiful, Greece-inspired home in the heart of Tehran’s cultural district. The museum celebrates Haydeh’s legacy, as well as Iranian art, dance, and culture. Her passion continues to flourish, inviting others to do the same. By following and sharing, you help keep Haydeh’s love for dance alive, and inspire others to move, create, and dream, just as Haydeh and her museum do today.