The talk presents Common Grounds, a project about overlooked everyday lace in the Blackborne Lace collection at The Bowes Museum culminating in a two room installation of 54 light- sensitive drawings in the museum’s Fashion and Textile galleries (May - July 2015). The talk will share how the exhibition developed in collaboration with Joanna Hashagen (Curator, The Bowes Museum) and Anabel Talbot (Lace scholar) from two years studying this lace that had lain unexamined in a trunk for over 70 years. It describes how used drawing to examine and make individual records of 54 lace caps and how this work invented new material techniques of drawing specific to this project, found parallels between activities of conservation and art practice, trialed methods of museum display to ask questions about preservation, what is worthy of saving for the future and why?

This talk was one of two in this event as part of the Lace End - to- End series . The other presentation was from Ghanaian artist , Godfried Donkor.