The staff and Trustees of the Crafts Study Centre want to thank Professor Lesley Millar MBE for her tireless support of the Crafts Study Centre over the years, but particularly over the last 9 months during which she has served as Interim Director. Lesley’s retirement in late September is the culmination of more than thirty years working at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), a career that has included many influential exhibitions of textile art, publications, and cohorts of PhD students. Since 2015, she has been director of the International Textile Research Centre at UCA (and before that led The Anglo-Japanese Textile Research Centre from 2004), pioneering new research in the field.

Lesley gave her final professorial lecture in June 2023 at UCA Farnham. The lecture ‘HelloGoodbye: myredthread’ provided a run through of a long list of exhibitions that Lesley has curated and her collaborations with artists across the globe, particularly Japanese textile artists such as Reiko Sudo and Yasumasa Komiya. Large-scale textile exhibitions have achieved a degree of prominence in recent years, with Anni Albers and Magdalena Abakanowicz showcased at London’s Tate Modern (in 2018-19 and 2022-23 respectively), but Lesley has long been alert to textile’s architectural and spatial qualities, pushing at the boundaries of its immersive, tactile, performative, and emotional qualities. From site-specific exhibitions, such as Cloth and Memory at the Salt Mills in Yorkshire (2013), to an exhibition by Lise Bjørne Linnert that was a memorial to missing women on the US/Mexico border (Desconocida: Unknown, 2009), Lesley has explored the full breadth of textile’s ability to engage and envelop.

In a reception at the Crafts Study Centre held after the lecture, students, colleagues, and contacts, past and present, were given a chance to celebrate the prodigious output of one of the most important voices in textile research in Britain in the last few decades. We will miss her as a regular presence at UCA but look forward to working with her as one of the Centre’s Trustees.

On behalf of the trustees, I want to thank Lesley for her consistently engaged and engaging contribution to our Board, which reflects not only her deep knowledge of textiles, but also her unflagging commitment to all that craft entails. Edward Wates, Chair of Trustees