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…
Category Archives: PIONEERS
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…
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…
Pioneering American Minimalist Agnes Martin is world-renowned for her vast, meditative canvases, with broad planes of luminous colour and trembling, hand-drawn lines. Primarily a painter with a capital ‘P’, and with little interest in fashion, she might seem an unlikely figure to associate with fabric and textiles. Yet closer examination of her practice, and indeed…
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…
Motherhood is a recurring theme in the art of British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, an intimate subject so close to her heart she would return to it over and over again. Mother to four children, she juggled raising them almost singlehandedly, while continuing to create some of the most important and enduring sculptures of the 20th…
Motherhood and creativity: it’s a tricky, loaded subject that has been the subject of much debate. Do the two roles blend into and complement one another, or are they opposing forces pulling women in different directions? As as a mother myself, I know what it feels like to juggle different identities, and yet how the…
In this series, I’ll look at art works featuring fabric by three very different women from Kazakhstan. I’d like to find out why Almagul Menlibayeva created epic videos and photographs of women swathed (or strangled?) by traditional fabrics in front of historical monuments. I’ll discover how Gulnur Mukazhanova reapplies felting techniques to create haunting face…
Embroidery is deeply entrenched in South American history, spanning from ancient times all the way up to the present day. Its history is fascinatingly diverse, demonstrating the great skill and ingenuity that has been passed on from one generation to the next through the millennia. Over the centuries, South American embroidery has evolved into a…
From Viking Age clothing to Catholic vestments and prestigious royal gowns, European embroidery has a rich history that is closely intertwined with our cultural past. Europe was also a site for embroidery innovation; techniques that were discovered here continue to live on today in the clothes we wear and the ways we decorate our homes….
The art of adorning clothing with embroidery has been an Indian tradition for more than 5,000 years. Its history is deeply embedded into the history of Indian culture, religion and daily life, and it is a tradition that continues to this day. Throughout Indian history embroidery has been there, adorning the homes of ordinary people…
The journey of embroidery in the United States is long and complex, with many twists and turns along the way. It begins with the ancient cultures of Native America, and travels through the 17th century New World, flourishing in the American colonies and remaining a popular pastime in the later cities that emerged. Because of…
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