sutton071

Plants, flowers, gardens, insects and birds are a rich source of inspiration for artists and designers of all kinds. This beautiful guide demonstrates how to get the most out of your surroundings to create original and unique pieces in textiles. Beginning with a chapter on drawing from nature, the book demonstrates how to use sketchbooks and create mood boards to explore your local environment and landscape. The author demonstrates how to make small pieces such as folding books based on observational drawing and stitch. Moving on to a section on floral inspiration, the author shows how to use plants and flowers in your work, from using stencilled flower motifs as embellishment to printing with plants onto fabric and making simple relief prints. Finally, the Taking Flight chapter demonstrates how to move into three-dimensions and sculptural work with birds and insects made from cloth. Featuring step-by-step projects as well as work from contemporary artists, makers and collaborative gro...

The Fibre Fables exhibition, which is running at the The Stainless gallery, in New Delhi, India,  is a collaborative effort between contemporary artists/film makers/ photographers/sculptors ​/ installation artists and weavers in Raj Group's factory at Panipat ​, India.​ The eleven participating artists are: Abeer Gupta, Brahm Maira, Dhvani Behl, Durga Kainthola, Nidhi Khurana, Nikheel Apahle, Puneet Kaushik, Sahaya Sharma, Sandeep Biswas, Shivani Aggarwal, Vibhu Galhotra. This looks to be a fascinating collaborative effort between so many unique and individual artists, that it would be well worth visiting the gallery if you are in the New Delhi area throughout December 2015. The curator of the exhibition is Shailin Smith, and it seems only right that, after so much effort put into the exhibition, they explain the reasoning behind Fibre Fables. ​The Raj Group was established in 1939, a midst a growing industry of carpet weaving. They gradually evolved to establish high pr...

Illustration: Dennis Potter. Big Boro Japan and Japanese culture has both fascinated and inspired creative individuals across the planet for generations. The defined nature of Japanese culture, both in the visual and in the conceptual, lends itself to a broad interpretation and reinterpretation by artists from a range of backgrounds and disciplines. The artist Dennis Potter is inspired by a number of different elements of Japanese, and East Asian culture. He has travelled and lived in a number of environments through East Asia, and has been correspondingly influenced within his creative work by those environments. Illustration: Dennis Potter. Big Boro , detail One specifically Japanese inspired creative theme that Dennis has used in his work, is that of the kimono, more specifically the hakui, which is a kimono worn by Buddhist pilgrims who circumambulate the Japanese island of Shikoku. This specific and simple garment works as a metaphor for experience and memory, because it is inscri...

Illustration: Anthony Stevens A Good Age The present art world is such a large and diverse one, we are indeed lucky to live in a period of such intense and widespread creativity. Of course, the internet has helped enormously to connect so many of us together, allowing people like myself to highlight creative individuals as never before, and for that we have to be truly grateful. One of the creative individuals that I have come across online recently, is the artist Anthony Stevens. Anthony uses his work as a form of therapy, a means of expressing and processing his life, both in the past and in the present, particularly as regards trauma and its after effects. As he says himself, his work is about, "...me dancing with my inner dynamics so that I can find a rhythm that is both constructive and wonderful." Illustration: Anthony Stevens Modern Man We are all trying to make sense of our lives, and to make sense of the environment around us. One of the best ways to do that, to work...

Weaving has got to be one of the oldest of human occupations, countless generations have been honing and perfecting their skills across millennia, and continue to do so to this day. Although industrial weaving now dominates the textile industry, hand weaving is still an important element within the textile world, it has an enviable status and position, and is often considered one of the senior skills within the many that make up the varied textile world. That hand weaving is still very much with us, still a learnt skill, has much to do with the individuals that have been involved in the hand-weaving world, those who work within hand-production, and just as importantly, those who teach and in teaching, pass on the accumulated skills gathered from seemingly countless generations. Teaching hand skills in order to bring enjoyment to one generation, and to pass on learnt skills to the next, is an important part of the story of hand craft in any discipline. Without teachers, generational ski...

Illustration: Artwork by Mary Bero I thought you might be interested in the 'Speaking With Threads' exhibition that is being held at the Craft Alliance Center of Art and Design, St Louis, Missouri from August 28 to October 25 2015.  'Speaking With Threads' is an exhibition that features fiber artists that who are exploring the the overlap between contemporary art, craft, and popular culture. The artists involved are: Mary Bero, Sonya Clark, Kathy Halper, Cindy Hickok, Mark Newport, Carol Shinn, Benji Whalen. Illustration: Artwork by Sonya Clark (photo credit: Taylor Dabney) There is quite a lot of detailed information that has been supplied by the organisers, so rather than me trying to sum up in my own words, it might be easier to give it to you the information straight from the organisers themselves, that information is as follows: Speaking with Threads  features seven artists whose work incorporates utilitarian skills like embroidery, knitting, and sewing, and elevat...

Matt Smith is a textile artist and ceramicist who has an intriguing exhibition at the Ink_d Gallery in Brighton, England, which opens, July 4 2015. The exhibition is entitled ‘Trouble with History’ and will feature a collection of textile-based art made from vintage tapestries and domestic textile kits, which have been unpicked, reworked, and subsequently subverted from their perceived norm. I understand that not everyone is going to be comfortable with the idea of the level of textile manipulation that Matt uses in his work, but this isn’t a quirky exhibition or one that is done for the sake of it, there are some real issues here and they tend to be issues that affect us all, that should make us think, and perhaps even make some uncomfortable. The results of Matt’s intervention and manipulation is to shift the emphasis of our standard perception of the norm. Without a real focus to the composition, is there a connection we can forge, can we identify, sympathize, or generally empathize...

Illustration: Andrea Vail. Gained (LOST) Opportunity , 2010. The work of artist Andrea Vail is dedicated to, and uses a number of formats, disciplines and traditional crafts. Common themes run through her varied work which are as significant and fundamental as the history of our species. Memory, the layers of time and the significance of objects imbued with personality and a fundamental symbolism are an integral part of her work and guide us through a variety of everyday and abstract ideas, which in turn give us perhaps a sense of our belonging within the timeframe of the environment and that of our species.   Although Vail's work covers a number of themes and ideas, it is perhaps as well to pick out one of those themes, to follow a strand of thought in some ways. A good example would be that of the simple key. A key in its own right is merely a tool made of metal in order to lock and unlock a mechanism. However, this simple but iconic tool has gradually become imbued with our...

 Illustration: Clare Plug. Ice Crack 2 , 2008. The New Zealand textile artist Clare Plug has spent the last few years of her career developing a fascinating body of work that entails intimately observed details along with wider conceptions and observations of the most rarely visited of all the planets continents. In 2006 Plug was lucky enough to visit the continent of Antarctica as part of a fellowship, staying with the official government Antarctica NZ at Scott Base in the vicinity of the Ross Ice Shelf. It is no small exaggeration to say that this experience fundamentally changed her views and the entire aspect of her work, so much so that much of the textile art work that she produces to this day is haunted by this most spectacular and hauntingly beautiful continent. Illustration: Clare Plug. Ice Crack 2 (detail), 2008. The three works shown here are examples of Plug's Antarctica Series which explores a number of aspects of the continent from the fragile and relatively recent...