One of Britain’s most exciting and adventurous textile and wallpaper designers working today, Ellen Merchant places traditional print processes and high-quality materials at the heart of her creative practice. Inspired by the Arts and Crafts emphasis on hand-made design over mass-produced goods, her work embraces traditional, hand-block printing techniques and features intricate, ornate, botanical designs…
Category Archives: PIONEERS
Leading Amsterdam design studio Buro Bélen have been steadily building their reputation as innovators in interior and textile design since 2012, and their work can now be found in major museum collections around the world. Their approach is simple yet admirable: to create useful products based on ethical production with a richly tactile, sensorial, and…
Contemporary, German-born textile artist Joana Schneider’s art takes many forms, from haunting, mask-like faces and rhythmic abstractions to excerpts of text. But running through her multifarious subject matter is a common theme; the techniques and materials associated with the fishermen and netmakers of the harbour areas in The Hague, an area she has come to…
Contemporary British artist Lucy Sparrow makes vast, immersive installations featuring hand-made felt objects that range from grocery store goods to full-scale replica works of art. Known colloquially as ‘the felt lady’, Sparrow has earned a widespread, global following in the past 10 years, because her exquisitely-crafted soft sculptures are as much a celebration of artisanal…
In the last six years since we first collaborated there has been an explosion of newcomers to the indie pattern industry. How has this affected Paper Theory? It’s amazing how much the sewing scene has changed in such a short time! I could never have guessed it. Competition in the market has grown hugely, which…
Renowned Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray (1910-1996) was one of the 20th century’s most remarkable artists, and a current large-scale retrospective at London’s Tate Modern pays homage to the depth and breadth of her legacy. She worked with predominantly with batik, and later acrylic painting on canvas, producing fantastically intricate and brilliantly colourful marks…
Tell us a bit about yourself. I’m Isabelle, I’m French, half Korean through my mom, and I currently live in France. As a student, I lived in the US for a year, in China for a year, and I worked in Berlin, Germany for three years before coming back to Paris right before Covid. What’s…
Tell us a bit about yourself. I grew up in the south with a father in finance and a mother who was a chemist so how I ended up in fashion is still kind of a mystery. I did grow up around multiple generations of women who sewed, crochet and quilted, like most of us…
Since launching her eponymous fashion label in 2009, French designer Olympia Le-Tan has earned a cult following for her whimsical, playful and artisanal approach to making accessories. From the outset she has been producing stylised ‘storybook bags,’ hand-woven clutch bags in the same size and shape as limited-edition books, featuring ‘covers’ with references to pop…
One might say that tartan runs through my veins! I’ve always had a deep and personal connection to the Scottish Arts. Growing up with a bass drumming dad, I was surrounded by kilts, bagpipes and Highland Games. From a very young age, I was completely mesmerized and hooked. Since the age of three, being fitted…
Now in her 93rd year, Colombian contemporary fibre artist Olga de Amaral makes woven textile art that is reliant on a slow, structured approach, one that results in striking, monumental woven wall hangings and installations that are deeply embedded with exquisite craftsmanship. Yet she also relies on spontaneity and intuition, choosing to forgo pre-planned ideas…
Innovation was at the heart of Ruth Adler Schnee’s design practice, which encompassed radical, modernist building interiors and woven textiles throughout the mid-century modernist era. After fleeing to the United States in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime, she went on to forge a monumentally successful career at a time when opportunities for women and…
American contemporary artist Janet Echelman makes vast, diaphanous sculptures that mimic the flowing patterns of nature, resembling air, water, wind and light. Made from colossal nets and strands of rope, her awe-inspiring aerial constructions merge aspects of fibre art with architecture, landscaping, and engineering, a fusion that has allowed her to entirely transform a vast…
Frances Featherstone’s indulgent and richly decorative paintings convey individuals caught in quiet moments of domestic bliss, gazing out of the window, lounging on the sofa, or (most commonly) curled up in bed under layer upon layer of plush, vividly patterned fabric. Looking down on these duvet dwellers from above, she captures them seemingly unaware, lost…
The American-Japanese sculptor, furniture designer and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi was one of the most singular and ambitious voices of the 20th century. Throughout his long and prolific career, Noguchi produced gardens, playgrounds, sculptures and monumental public art, along with furniture and architecture, which merged Japanese and American visual culture, and became part of his…
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