These charming streets.

Textile artist Debbie Smyth confesses her latest work is inspired by the ‘mundane charm’ of the Northern Quarter – a three dimensional drawing made with pins and thread

Debbie Smyth doesn’t make life easy for herself. While her peers may be content to stick to traditional craft techniques, the Irish textile artist has altogether different ideas: she creates intricate, large-scale wall ‘drawings’ using only pins and great spools of plain black thread. The result of her latest such installation is now on display in the central atrium of the Craft and Design Centre – a three-dimensional image of the altogether charming streets of Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

‘I create pin and thread drawings, which is a technique I developed during my degree course,’ says Smyth. ‘I was looking at ways to transform 2D into 3D – I wanted to take drawing off the page and bring it into the space.’

Smyth is something of a rising star in the craft world. Fresh out of art college, she beat 140 other designer-makers to win the Craft & Design Centre’s inaugural Exhibition Award at the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair last October – her prize being a solo show at the Craft & Design Centre. ‘I came up to Manchester in February to see the space and was immediately inspired by the Northern Quarter – it’s got a quirkiness I wanted to capture,’ she says. ‘Walking down the streets, it hasn’t lost any of its old, kind of mundane charm – I wanted to capture the things people don’t really see.’

While some might argue that the Northern Quarter is anything but mundane, Smyth’s work (rough and fraying knots, sharp perspective, taut black lines) does make a fair stab at summing up the fuzzy-round-the-edges appeal of Manchester’s self-styled creative quarter: the faded glory of former warehouses that sit cheek-by-jowl with the bars, coffee shops, restaurants and boutiques that open and close with reassuring regularity here. ‘I’m usually quite accurate and every angle has to be perfect,’ says Smyth, ‘but I made this one a lot more sketchy and rough because it gets the Northern Quarter’s feel.’

Because the work is site specific and temporary (nothing can be shipped in or out of the space due to the nature of Smyth’s technique), the artist has spent a week creating the work in public. ‘I like the interactive nature of it – it becomes more about the process than the finished piece and it’s important that people see that,’ she says. In fact, Smyth seems remarkably undaunted by the very public aspect of this particular commission, or by the fact that her work straddles the uncomfortable line between fine art and craft.

‘It’s better not to pigeonhole yourself,’ she says. ‘One minute I can be doing this, the next few weeks I’ll be back in my studio making smaller pieces for a craft fair. I’ve done design work, worked with architects on bigger pieces, and it keeps it fresh. I’d get so bored if I had to do the same thing day in, day out.’ As anyone who has ever spent time in a job they less-than-loved will agree, that’s a sentiment you can’t really argue with.

Threadbare: Drawings in Thread by Debbie Smyth, Manchester Craft & Design Centre, until 30 October. Free entry. There’s an opening event this Saturday (3 July, 2-4pm) with live music, refreshments and craft activities. Susie Stubbs is the Editor of Creative Tourist. Below: Debbie Smyth puts the finishing touches to her work.

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