Shannon SwinburnTextile Practicioner
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shannon.swinburn@gmail.com

@shanswinburn



Shannon Swinburn is an independant Textiles Practitioner currently studying MA Textiles at the Royal College of Art having previously studied BA Graphic Communication at Central Saint Martins. Her studies at the RCA are supported by the Haberdashers’ Scholarship,The Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation Prize, and The Textile Society Student Bursary Award.

Shannon’s work investigates the intrinsic links between gender, textiles, and modern-day computing. She aims to platform the untold stories of women in emergent technology through a series of interactive looms, sound, and textiles pieces. 


Give Me Guidance II
2024
Silk, Wool, Metal ‘Give Me Guidance’ is an ongoing project which platforms the contribution of craftswomen to the NASA Apollo missions, through the hand-weaving of Core Rope Computer Memory Modules.

During these missions skilled craftswomen were hire to hand weave Core Rope Computer Memory Modules. These women worked together to weave binary code around or through a core to determine whether it would represent a one or a zero. The women were nicknamed the ‘LOL Department’ which stood for ‘Little Old Ladies.’Often left out of the narrative of the Apollo Missions the names of some of the women were found in only one press release, which read:’Space-age needleworkers weave rope memories: Vernell Norman, Caroline Butler, Helen Lennon, Edna Walcott, and Mary Julian.’ 

Through the creation of a frame loom inspired by the Apollo Guidance Computer Model AGC-3 I aim to reweave the narrative of the Apollo Missions by presenting a counterfactual history in which the craftswomen were placed at the forefront of the mission’s new headlines. Supported by a speculative newspaper highlighting the feats of the craftswomen through counterfactual headlines, this new guidance computer weaves and encodes such headlines via binary beading in order to hold and foreground the woven memory of these craftswomen who were integral to these missions. Each panel of the loom represents one of the women, along with their speculative headline, and stores the woven memory of Vernell Norman, Helen Lennon and Edna Walcott.