From psychedelic swirls to towering fragments of brutalist architecture, the pioneering textiles of British designer Barbara Brown encapsulated the spirit of the 1960s space age. Looking to the future of design, she took inspiration from – as she put it – “machines and architecture”, to create visually striking patterns featuring vivid colours and dizzying optical…
Category Archives: PIONEERS
Textile designer and artist Althea McNish holds a significant place in history, as the first designer of African-Caribbean descent to find international success. Her lively, exuberant textiles were a breath of fresh air in postwar 1950s Britain, injecting the cultural landscape with great swathes of lush, tropical colour. Turner found the inspiration for her fertile…
20th century British artist Henry Moore’s monumental sculpture is widely known and celebrated across the world, but perhaps less well studied is his intriguing relationship with textiles. During the 1940s and 1950s, Moore produced a body of textile designs, which open up a new understanding of his visual language, and his way of seeing and…
The English late 19th and early 20th century designer Charles Francis Annesley (CFA) Voysey made a remarkable contribution to British design, through architecture, furniture design, wallpaper, textiles, and more. During his lifetime, he earned a widespread reputation as a leading light in the Arts and Crafts movement. Much like his contemporary William Morris, Voysey believed…
Japanese fashion designer and powerhouse Issey Miyake cared deeply about the relationship between clothing and the living, breathing bodies that inhabited them. He designed clothes that were meant to be worn, believing they were only truly complete once they had been integrated into the lives of their wearers. Yet there was nothing ordinary or basic…
Frank Lloyd Wright might be best known as one of most revered American architects of entire 20th century – he pioneered the Prairie Style, along with ‘organic architecture’ designed in harmony with nature, and cutting-edge icons including New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. But perhaps less well known is his brief foray into textile and wallpaper…
In the hands of contemporary artist Faig Ahmed, traditional Azerbaijani rugs are given a fantastically surreal twist, with elements that seem to warp, melt, and dissolve into puddles on the gallery floor. An intricate fusion of high quality, traditional weaving techniques and digital design, his visually arresting artworks speak of a need to keep ancient…
The renowned Parisian, inter-war fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet earned the moniker of “architect of couture” amongst her peers during her lifetime, for her innately structural approach to clothing. Her garments were constructed using the diagonal bias cut as a prominent feature, along with Grecian-style drapery, to create the most striking, theatrical visual impact. Much like…
Contemporary, Greek-born fashion designer Sophia Kokosalaki was part of a burgeoning group of designers who rejuvenated the British fashion scene during the early naughties. Her uncanny ability to weave cutting edge, punk templates with the timeless elegance and draped silhouettes of the Greek traditions that had informed her way of thinking since childhood swiftly earned…
French dressmaker Madame Alix Grès made her name in the mid-20th century with sleek, minimal garments that mimed the slender, vertical lines of Greco-Roman architecture. An outlier in the fashion world, she eschewed mid-20th century trends for a timeless elegance, forging her own singular path. Madame Grès’s aspirations to become a sculptor were quashed by…
From vast, cascading curtains of silk to hand-woven fishing nets, contemporary artist Carolina Caycedo has worked with a wide range of fabrics and textiles, deftly interweaving their tactile properties into her conceptual practice. Her most recent art is an examination into the social divisions and oppressions surrounding the privatization of water, working closely with communities…
Japanese contemporary artist Yoko Daihara makes brilliantly colourful, map-like artworks that explore the boundaries between digital and analogue technology. She translates her own drawings and digital images into densely worked, tactile wool textiles, which have the look and feel of paintings, prompting some to call her art ‘woven paintings’. The imagery in her curious worlds…
The early 20th century Austrian designer Dagobert Peche was a remarkable talent, whose visionary career expanded across a seemingly endless array of decorative art forms, including metalwork, glass, ceramics, furniture, architecture, and textiles. One of his greatest contributions came in the form of lacemaking – he produced and designed a large body of stunningly intricate…
In 2013, Argentinian artist Marta Minujin celebrated her 70th birthday by ‘marrying’ art. She staged a huge wedding party at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), during which she was carried around in a horse drawn carriage wearing a lavish white dress. It is a fitting introduction to Minujin’s madcap, eccentric world,…
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…
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