Every summer, British fields are tied up with brightly coloured plastic string. Baling twine holds the hay together from the moment the baler spits out the bale until the moment somebody cuts the knot. Then it has no further use: it is burned, buried, or left in the hedge to weather into the ground for the next few centuries. It is the most consequential material on a farm, and the least regarded — the thing that holds everything, briefly, and is then thrown away.
Darcey Fleming grew up around it. She now weaves with it, using twine donated by farmers near her in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, and this year that practice won her the Brookfield Properties Craft Award, given with Collect and the Crafts Council. Her first solo exhibition, (Extra)ordinary, has been open since March at 99 Bishopsgate in the City of London — woven sculptures in orange, blue and acid green hung in a building where money is counted, made of the material that ties down the food supply.
A self-taught grammar
She had no training in weaving. The method is her own, arrived at by doing it: cutting, knotting, splitting the twine, again and again, until the plastic starts behaving like a fibre with opinions. Nothing about it is quick. Repetition is not a stage on the way to the work; it is the work, in the way that a leatherworker's hundredth stitch is not a rehearsal for the hundred and first.
Fleming was a professional athlete before she was an artist, and she has never pretended the two are unrelated. The pieces are large — A room (2024) measures nearly four metres in every direction — and she carries them out into the landscape herself. The strain is not incidental colour for a press release. It is a working condition, the same way the weight of stone is a condition of carving.
What the material remembers
Waste is a fashionable subject and an easy one; a great deal of art has been made out of announcing that rubbish exists. What lifts Fleming's work above the genre is that she does not use the twine as evidence of a problem. She uses it as itself: a material designed for one job — holding things together — and returned to that job at a scale nobody intended. The hay is gone. The binding remains, enlarged into a room you could stand inside.
There is a Sarabande connection that fits the logic: she has been a resident at the foundation Lee Alexander McQueen set up for artists since 2023, and McQueen's own instinct — that the discarded and the unlovely can be dressed up into something ceremonial without losing their bite — runs directly through this work. The colours help. Baling twine comes in industrial oranges and blues chosen for visibility in a field, not for taste, and Fleming keeps them exactly as the farm supplied them.
Where we came in
This magazine began, years ago, by writing about bicycles grown from bamboo and belts cut by one man in a small workshop — about people making unremarkable things exceptionally, well before any institution arrived to explain them. It is an instinct we intend to keep. The vessels that argue and the hands that stay visible belong to the same family as a woman in a field, gathering the string that the harvest left behind.
Cut a bale open and the twine drops away, its job done, unnoticed. Fleming picks it up off the ground and asks it to hold one more thing: attention.