Warp + Weft #1 – Worstedopolis – Ronan Devlin Studio

Artwork | Digital | Environmental

Warp + Weft #1 – Worstedopolis
BD: is LIT, Bradford
Generative textile artwork
2025

Worstedopolis is a large-scale projected textile artwork created for Bradford City Hall as part of BDisLit 2025. The work draws directly from Bradford’s history as a global centre of worsted textile production, translating the logic of weaving (warp, weft, tension, repetition, and variation) into a continuously evolving audio-visual form.

Warp + Weft is an ongoing body of work that proposes a new civic graphic language for representing place. Drawing on textile design and production methods, the project replaces static symbols and flags with generative, time-based woven systems that evolve continuously. The moving textile becomes a model for place itself: layered, interdependent, and shaped by tension, repetition, and variation over time.

By translating textile structures into living systems, the resulting works offer an inclusive way of expressing heritage, contemporary culture, and collective identity — one that resists fixed narratives and instead reflects the complexity, change, and multiplicity inherent in a place.

CREDITS:
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Artist: Ronan Devlin
Sound: Ant Dickinson
Coding support: Davy Smith
AV: EMF & Chris Savage
Photography: Simon Williams
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1st Edition Commissioned by BD: is LIT