Cable Street has no cables. Twine Court has no twine. Walk through Shadwell today and the names above the doors still whisper what stood here for two centuries: a rope-making industry that ran through east London's docklands until the mid-1900s, then vanished, leaving only its street signs behind.
Curator Kirsty Lowry knotting rope in The Ropery, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo by Rocio Chacon.
The Ropery, a participatory exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, sets out to unravel that history. Opened in July as part of Backyard Biennial: East and curated by Kirsty Lowry and Helen Davison with designer and researcher Sanne Visser, the free show has drawn thousands of visitors into a single installation that has grown across the run, as people arrive to make rope and tie knots by hand.
Installation view, The Ropery. Photo by Rocio Chacon.
Rope making was a craft of patience. Hemp was left to 'ret' in water until only tough cellulose stalks remained, then dragged through a heckle board studded with steel pins, by women who were among the trade's earliest organised workers in a largely women-led industry. Spinners walked backwards from a rotating hook, judging thickness by instinct, and three strands twisted in opposite directions were laid together into rope. The finest were kept for a ship's rigging, then demoted down the chain of use until, worn through, packed as oakum to seal a hull. Little was ever wasted.
Visser's Ropemachine 2.0 in action at The Ropery. Photo by Rocio Chacon.
That same hands-on spirit runs through the exhibition. At Visser's Ropemachine 2.0, visitors work in groups to twist fibre into rope, while at the knotting tables, covered in linen printed with patterns from the Ashley Book of Knots, people sit and add their own knots to the growing installation. One afternoon, a visitor arrived with a cast iron bell, wanting to make a rope for it; a stranger who had only just learned to splice herself twenty minutes earlier offered to show him how.
Visser's own practice reimagines these techniques for a different raw material: human hair. Since graduating from Central Saint Martins, she has worked hair into yarns and objects for institutions including the V&A. Her project HairCycle collects donated hair from Newham salons, and a new body of work sits alongside the making stations, including stools scaled up from old bobbins and ropes that invite visitors in rather than holding them back.
Rope examples at The Ropery. Photo by Rocio Chacon.
The materials tell their own story of place: textiles from Camira Fabrics, timber from fallen London trees via Fallen & Felled, reclaimed wire. Archival ropes from Visser's studio sit alongside work from the Master Ropemakers at Chatham Historic Dockyard and pieces from Wax Atelier and Brian Turner.
Completing the show is a film by Samara Addai, tracing the poetic afterlife of these vanished crafts, a project with a personal thread: Addai found her family's hometown in the Philippines still grows the abacá plant once processed into manila fibre on these same streets.
The Ropery asks what we lose when we stop making things with our hands, and what we might recover by starting again. Pick up a length of rope and find out.
. . .
Further Information:
The Ropery is on view now at Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 30 August.
. . .
Image Credits:
Lead: Installation view, The Ropery. Photo by Rocio Chacon.
All further images as credited in captions.