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Textiles have always been such a large part of domestic life, as it still is today. However, what has sadly faded away producing a rupture in the constant that was for generations such an intimate part of life, is that of the craft skills that supported all forms of domestic textiles. Centuries of creative and repairing skills have died out within a generation; many will probably never again be resurrected on the same scale as that of our ancestors. In Closet Archaeology , the artist Diane Savona has created a form of vocabulary library of lost skills. However sad this may seem to one devoted to the textile crafts, perhaps more poignant still is the sense of lost lives and lost memories. Textiles, in many households, were literally often passed down over the generations. Therefore, woven, sewn, embroidered, crocheted, knitted and quilted forms often outlived their original owners. Many were offered as wedding or christening gifts from older to younger members of the same family. These ...

Illustration: Virginia Abrams. Reflections 5 , 2009. I am always pleasantly surprised and even intrigued when considering how many contemporary textile artists arrive at the genre from such diverse creative journeys and backgrounds. It perhaps says much about the comprehensive appeal of textile art that so many individuals feel compelled to take up the genre. Obviously, because of the diversity of these individual artists, textile art itself broadens its parameters immensely. The American textile artist Virginia Abrams has a background in organic chemistry and biochemistry. She is fascinated with the complex interactions of the natural world and her work is centred on this fascination. Abrams work runs on themes suggested by nature. I have chosen one of these themes water, to illustrate this article. All of these pieces are literally reflections. However, it would be misleading to believe that they are merely optical observations conceived by Abrams. These are complex recipes using ing...

Illustration: Ian O'Phelan. Night Flowers , 2009. The pattern work of the American artist, designer and illustrator Ian O'Phelan is an excellent example of the continuing relevance and contemporary usage of the repeat pattern. It is often thought that the great days of pattern work, whether that be textile or wallpaper, are well behind us and that the contemporary world has nothing of relevance to add to the accumulated wealth of the past. However, as the work featured in this article shows there are still a number of excellent young designers who are aware of both the historical context of pattern work and the relevance it has, or can have, to our contemporary world. Illustration: Ian O'Phelan. Fruit Vine II, 2009. Repeat pattern work is not the easiest of technical processes to master. To make a pattern appear both seamless and above all effortless is another process and level of achievement altogether. Although admittedly a basic repeat pattern is relatively easy to pr...

Illustration: Lisa Chipetine. Waves of Emotion: Relief, 2008. Illustration: Lisa Chipetine. Waves of Emotion: Relief (detail), 2008. The textile artist Lisa Chipetine is a woman who sees no merit in creative boundaries, frameworks and conventions. Her work is expressed by her belief in the limitless horizons of both self-expression and self-exploration. Of all her work, it seems only fitting to use some of the examples of her highly evocative emotions series as an illustration for this article. It is always refreshing to find a creative artist that is constantly striving to explore sources of creative freedom well outside the box of conventional rules, regulations and formulas. The imagery that Chipetine portrays in this particular set of work is one that hints at the realms of freedom, not only of creative expression, but also of the inner emotions. Using a title such as emotions is bound to produce many personal interpretations, as it should do. Creative work is subjective at the ...

Illustration: Nancy Clearwater Herman. In the Lady's Room. Felt work can be achieved through a number of formats and craft disciplines. To many it may seem thick, woolly and uneasy to manipulate. However, there are various means of controlling the chance and often arbitrary results of standard felting. Needle felting is a particularly good format as it allows a larger element of both precision and definition within felting. Compositions can be manipulated and engineered into any amount of decorative pattern and artwork. The artistic parameters of needle felting are particularly rich as is shown in the textile artwork of Nancy Clearwater Herman. Herman has produced a set of compositions that helps to lay to rest the idea that felt is a medium best suited to the practical and domestic aspects of textiles, rather than any form of fine art textiles. She has produced work that is extraordinarily exact, while at the same time being free from most forms of mechanised textile production....

Illustration: Erin Wilson. Short Story #4 , 2009. The textile artwork of Erin Wilson at first seems effortlessly simple. Small boxes are repeated in a composition that includes regular rows and columns. However, when you consider that each small frame has been individually and consciously designed as a unique composition, and that some of Wilson's finished pieces can incorporate a large number of individual small framed art pieces, then the task set by the artist becomes much more one of quiet construction, with each individual square being seen as a world in itself. All the fabrics are hand dyed by Wilson and so therefore, each compositional piece of artwork takes that hand dying into consideration, bringing a harmony and balance to the many individual works that go into making Wilson's textile pieces. Illustration: Erin Wilson. Short Story #5, 2009. In some respects, the artist has taken the idea of the mechanics of quilting and the production of pattern work into the realms...

Illustration: Linda McCurry. Tork. By Linda McCurry's own estimation, she has been involved in textiles ever since she was able to reach the foot pedal of a sewing machine, and it shows. Here is a lifetimes experience collected from a number of professional guises in the worlds of fashion, pattern prints, and ultimately textile art. McCurry has brought all the elements of her career into the textile artwork she now produces. There is much going on in the pieces that I have chosen to show in this article. Included are copious amounts of dynamic and energising compositional work, tied together with the experience of constructional tailoring, along with a very knowledgeable and balanced approach to surface pattern and mark-making. Illustration: Linda McCurry. Tork, Bridge to Hope. It is the combination of McCurry's experience in the tailoring and pattern making areas of the textile world, which seems to have added so much to the depth and experience of these compositions. There is...