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…
Category Archives: PIONEERS
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…
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…
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…
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…
Personal and collective stories about place and the need for belonging are woven tightly into the textile art of South African contemporary artist Igshaan Adams. His richly layered visual language brings together everyday ephemera from his home town, including shells, nylon rope, strips of fabric, plied cords, and beads. But it is also conceptually bound…
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