The stylish young British duo Charlie Casely-Hayford and Sophie Ashby both have individual, successful careers – Ashby is a celebrated interiors expert who recently on House & Garden’s Designer of the Year 2021, while Casely-Hayford is an esteemed British menswear designer who founded a business with his late father, Joe Casely-Hayford. But what unites them…
Category Archives: PIONEERS
What do the Royal School of Needlework, Julian Assange and Philip Pullman have in common? They all stitched parts of the 13-meter-long Magna Carta (An Embroidery) by British artist Cornelia Parker. Parker turns everyday objects into mesmerizing and thought-provoking artworks. In this case, she asked 250 people to help her recreate in thread-on-fabric the Wikipedia…
In Chiharu Shiota’s dreamy world vast webs are cast across space, creating dense tangles that cloak and consume everything around them. This includes the ordinary objects that we so often take for granted, such as keys, books, and even boats and pianos. When absorbed into the foggy midst of all this thread, we see how…
There is a chaotic, frenetic energy in Phyllida Barlow’s art, as piles of painted wood lean this way and that, and huge heaps of fabric are bundled into balls and strung up on the gallery walls. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Barlow is a mother of four – this free-spirited playfulness seems to conjure…
Matt Gibberd and Faye Toogood are one of today’s leading design duos, with a slew of magazines including Vogue, The New York Times and Dezeen rushing to promote their work. Based in London, each have separate, successful careers to their name – Gibberd is a property specialist and architectural journalist, while Toogood is a furniture,…
Dutch artist Michael Raedecker’s stylish contemporary art is a blend of mediums, merging painting on canvas with intricate areas of embroidery. His artworks have an eerie, haunting quality, combining loosely painted backgrounds with detailed areas of linear thread that describe desolate houses, sparse gardens or quiet interiors where no one is around. Sometimes the thread…
Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most radical photographers to emerge out of contemporary America. In her deeply emotive imagery, she examines how our social relationships define who we are, and give us a sense of belonging in an increasingly uncertain world. Perhaps it’s no surprise then, that Weems became a mother at a…
Asafo flags are embedded deep into the history of Ghana, and their legacy lives on today. They are a 3- or 400-year-old tradition from the Fante people of Ghana that has been passed down from one generation to the next since the 17th century. Flag makers throughout this long history have been gradually changing and…
It’s a familiar scene; family members crowd expectantly around the dining table watching as a birthday cake is cut into slices. But this is no ordinary, nostalgic snapshot – instead, faces are partially concealed by pixelated grids of embroidery, rendering them as fuzzy and unrecognisable as distant memories. This artwork, titled New Jersey XIII, 2016,…
Artist, African-American, woman and mother: these are the many roles woven into Kara Walker’s identity. Her art brings these personal experiences out into the open, examining them in a wider social context informed by history, mythology and politics. In particular, Walker’s role as a mother has undoubtedly informed some of her most powerful works of…
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do. My name is Mel and I’m 33. At the moment, I’m on maternity leave with my son, but before this, I was working as a pharmacist. When I’m not working or being a mum, you can find me at my sewing machine or enjoying some…
In 2014, Kazakh artist Saule Suleimenova took a trip out of Almaty and realised that the steppes – which one imagines wild and unspoiled – were covered in plastic bags. She immediately abandoned all her materials and produced her first plastic ‘painting’, a beautiful bouquet of flowers made entirely out of discarded shopping bags glued…
Berlin-based artist Gulnur Mukazhanova received a peculiar inheritance from her grandmother: a collection of traditional Kazakh garments and textiles. She wore one of the garments for her wedding, to question the dominance of the customary white dress, while the rest have inspired her recent works. Sadly, traditional crafts have been steadily disappearing in Kazakhstan, Gulnur’s…
Leading American sculptor Anne Truitt is widely recognised as a singular figure in the Washington Colour School of the mid-20th century, whose monumental columns of colour are steeped with intense human emotion. She successfully weaved her family life into this artistic practice, exploring how the two could feed creatively and intuitively into one another. At…
For Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva, fabric is both a way to tell a story and a metaphor for storytelling itself. In photography, video and digital works she uses fabric as a subject and a character. Take The Red Butterfly, which features a woman swathed in seemingly endless red fabric, wearing numerous skull caps, and in…
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