Cecilia Vicuña has made a lifelong mission to reinvent the quipu, (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language) an ancient system of coloured, knotted threads from the Andean mountains, once used for keeping records, telling stories, recording communal rules, and even writing poems. Throughout her career, which has spanned more than five decades, she has produced…
All posts by Rosie Lesso
The French Fauvist painter Andre Derain made paintings of France that were charged with electrifyingly bolts of colour, including the blazing shade of ochre seen in YELLOW Linen. Along with Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck (among others) they spearheaded a new brand of painting that moved beyond the real world into the realms of…
The soft sculptures of Maria A. Guzmán Capron depict larger-than-life curvy, vibrant characters whose joyful effervescence reflects the rich complexity of Capron’s multicultural identity, which spans Europe, South America and the United States. She says, “I need a variety of sources, because that is the only way I will approximate the complexity of a self…
Artist, designer and thinker, Josef Frank was an outspoken pioneer, whose practice spanned diverse disciplines, including art, architecture and textiles. In his textile and embroidery work he broke away from the simplicity of modernism with fluid, organic repeat patterns designed entirely by hand, featuring swirling flora and fauna in bold, Matisse-like motifs and intensely vivid…
Chilean arpilleras might at first look like playful, whimsical patchworks, featuring brightly coloured houses, scattered children and blazing suns. But closer inspection reveal that they are a potent, emotionally raw form of resistance and rebellion, one that emerged during the brutalist regime of Augusto Pinochet from 1973-1989. While women were forced into submissive silence by…
Themes of identity, belonging, transience and displacement permeate throughout the art of Tsherin Sherpa, whose art is as diverse and complex as his life. As a Tibetan born in Nepal who now lives in United States, his own life has taken its fair share of twists and turns, giving him a multitude of ideas to…
There is a curious and unexpected dichotomy between sound and fabric in the art of Vivian Caccuri, inviting us to consider the ways in which the two are more closely interrelated than we might at first think. Primarily a sound-based artist, her recent forays into textiles has provided a tactile and sensorial element to her…
Hailing from Johannesburg, textile artist Billie Zangewa makes intricate stitched collages from raw silk that celebrate the joys and struggles of her life as a black woman and mother. Her work reflects on the ways in which black women’s wider political status bleeds into their everyday lives, a process she calls “daily feminism.” Yet there…
There is a quiet, understated elegance in the art of French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose dreamlike paintings and murals came to encapsulate the spirit of late 19th century Symbolism. His timeless models, adorned in drapes and gowns, drift through panoramic scenes, where muted shades like PALE GREEN spill out onto the ground or…
The tapestries of American textile artist Erin M. Riley are remarkably frank, depicting dark and emotionally raw subjects ranging from nude selfies and private wounds to messy, unkept tabletops scattered with the kind of awkward detritus that would make most cringe with embarrassment. In doing so, her art becomes a powerful form of catharsis, laying…
French 19th century artist Eugene Boudin captured vast, soaring skies filled with flickering patches of dappled cloud, which flit between soft shades of pale grey, light blue, and the hazy lilac grey of Grey Pearl. His mastery of cloud painting even prompted Barbizon painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot to coin Boudin as the “king of the skies.”…
Contemporary textile designer Lisa King makes striking prints which are an eclectic blend of influences, from the lush plant life of her childhood in Thailand to her mother’s vibrant collection of textiles and antiquities, her background training as a dancer, and her current life in industrialised London. She says, “I draw a lot of parallels…
Scottish artist and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh might be best remembered for his Art Nouveau architecture and furniture, but he was also a highly skilled painter who made distinctive, stylised paintings of flowers and landscapes filled with quiet, understated wonder. Cool, crisp shades of metallic green like Laurel Leaf were a recurring feature of his…
The colossal, tactile artworks of contemporary Ghanaian artist El Anatsui have a ghostly, liminal quality that is impossible to pin down, hovering somewhere between sculpture, woven textile, and installation. Made from salvaged scraps of plastic, wood, and, most recently shiny metal, his suspended structures perform the challenging trick of turning discarded scraps into treasure; whether…
Bands of horizon where sky meets and merges with water were a recurring theme in the art of the Symbolist painter James Abbot McNeill Whistler, flooding his canvases with the atmospheric light of a faraway dream. As much as Whistler is known as the painter of the night with his sombre, subtle ‘Nocturnes’ series, he…
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