Award-winning textile artist Ekta Kaul has a deep-rooted connection to her Indian heritage, which she brings to her London-based practice today. In her hands, India’s Kantha stitching is a deeply tactile means of telling stories, weaving together references to history, place and belonging with tightly bound, intricate passages of thread on indulgent fabrics such as…
Category Archives: TEXTILES IN ART
American fashion designer, textile, and performance artist Nick Cave has an uncanny ability to weave ordinary detritus, from sticks to stuffed-sock monkey dolls, crocheted doilies, repurposed sweaters, and dyed hair into the most fantastical, transformative costumes. The artist is best-known for his intricate, elaborate ‘Soundsuits’, which are designed to be both seen and heard, giving…
American artist Sheila Hicks creates whirlwinds of technicoloured thread, knotting, weaving, twisting and spinning dyed, natural yarns such as wool, linen and silk into richly tactile, all-consuming installations. Since the 1950s, Hicks has been producing woven sculptures of all shapes and sizes, pushing and pulling at the boundaries between art and textiles in order to…
Icelandic textile designer and artist Ýr Jóhannsdóttir has recently been making waves in the realms of fashion and textiles for her whimsical, colourful and fabulously eccentric garments, all produced under the label Yrurari. Knitting is the backbone of her practice, but her response to the craft is far from traditional, ranging from upcycling old jumpers…
London based artist Daisy May Collingridge’s eccentric, intricately layered ‘squishy sculptures’ break down the boundaries between fashion, costume and art in the most playful and humorous ways. She works with soft jersey, hand-dyed into delicate flesh tones to mime the delicate, shifting hues of human skin. These are stitched together in layer upon layer…
Since the late 1970s, British artist Rachel Scott has found remarkable ways of merging art and life into one. A weaver, sewer, mender and patchwork-maker, her legacy of creating is closely intertwined into her family life, as a mother to two now grown-up daughters, and the wife of the abstract expressionist painter Frank Bowling. Endlessly…
Georgia O’Keeffe was a woman of immeasurable talent and ambition, one who charged through the 20th century with a singular and uncompromising vision. Her name is synonymous today with immediately arresting paintings of sleek, sensuous flowers and the barren, hollow bones of New Mexico. But there is another, less written about side to O’Keeffe, that…
Light, airy and weightless, Korean-born contemporary artist Do Ho Suh’s ephemeral architectural constructs are made from great swathes of sheer fabric and thread. He reconstructs the many different places he has lived around the world, recreating distinctive features, rooms and even staircases of places he has passed through during his nomadic life. Do Ho calls…
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…
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…
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…
Like many artists of her generation, mid-20th century sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth saw the importance of honing an intimate personal style, one that could reflect the same language as her art. And like her bold, sleek sculptures, her way of dressing was equally as elegant, classic and refined, often with practicality in mind. Along with…
With a successful career spanning more than 60 years, Serbian-American artist Marina Abramovic has jokingly named herself the “grandmother of performance art.” In this time, she has pushed her body to the extreme, inflicting pain, suffering, trauma and violence on herself in the name of art. Her work is no theatrical performance – instead it…
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…
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