Inspired by the V&A
11 May 2012 6 Comments
in dye, exhibitions, felt Tags: crochet, felt, gauze, indigo, muslin, sake bottle, shibori, silk, V&A, velvet, vessels
Every year the Victoria & Albert Museum holds an art competition, called “Inspired by” for people on part-time courses. Entrants have to create a piece inspired by work in the collections of the V&A or the Museum of Childhood. Selected works are displayed in the relevant museum in October.
I’m planning to enter some of the indigo felted vessels I’ve made. The pieces that have inspired me are a stoneware sake set by Yamada Hikaru made around 1979, and a 17th-century blue and white porcelain sake bottle, maker unknown.
I love the organic simplicity of the forms of the vessels in the sake set, and I thought I would use indigo dye and shibori, both traditional Japanese techniques, to add the blue and white element.
You’ve already seen some of these, but here’s a photo of the final set. The two larger felt vessels are ombre dyed with indigo, while the five smaller ones are nuno felted with a different yarn or fabric, also dyed with indigo.
Larger felt vessel, ombre dyed with indigo
Smaller felt vessel, also ombre dyed with indigo
Nuno felt pot with silk velvet
Nuno felt pot with cotton muslin
Nuno felt pot with silk chiffon
Nuno felt pot with ombre-dyed crocheted lambswool
Nuno felt pot with cotton gauze
Just have to fill in the entry form now – probably the hardest part! ;-)
Made 2012 at Morley Gallery
20 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in exhibitions Tags: felt, machine knitting, Morley Gallery, tapestry
The current exhibition at Morley Gallery features work from most of the textiles courses (apart from us and the foundation course, as we get our own exhibition in the summer).
There’s a great selection of pieces from several disciplines, including mosaics, interior design and quilting, but – surprise! – most of my favourite pieces were in felt or fibre.
Mary Campbell’s “Containment – Release” featured nuno felt on cotton scrim with what looked like some shibori resists at the top:
Suzanne Osborne’s soft landscape tapestry was also full of textures, while Christine Eborali’s “Rage 2″ was woven totally from discarded plastic packaging. I’ve seen the latter gradually growing over the past year, as the tapestry class uses the same studio as us:
The printing on show included a lovely silk andmixed fibre scarf by Katy Broomfield, who used heat transfer printing overdyed with shibori:
Plus a great selection of furoshiki bags, including two from Avril of Stitch in Science:
I also liked the felted machine knitting by Uli Jaeger, and Moira Searle’s sleeveless coat in felted lambswool and Italian silk:
Finally, there was a wonderful needle-felted alien, “Christopher’s Creature”, by Jessica Lempp, based on a child’s drawing. Sadly, I failed to get the photo in focus – so you’ll have to go and see for yourselves if you can!
The exhibition runs until 29 March. Morley Gallery is at 61 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7HT
Inspired by…patterns and textures
02 Mar 2012 3 Comments
in exhibitions Tags: British Library, Henry Cole, Japanese woodblock prints, Olga Hirsch
Last night I spent an enjoyable evening at the British Library at an event called “Inspired by…patterns and textures”.
Part of the British Library’s five-day Spring Festival, the event was a chance for designers and makers to see some of the creative collections, talk to the curators and even handle(!) some of the items.
For me, the Japanese collections were a particular highlight, especially four small volumes from 1904, called Senshoku zuan (Design for dyeing), containing 100 textile designs. Sorry – no pictures of these, as they were too small to keep the pages open and photograph properly.
There were also collections of woodblock prints of clouds, waves and butterflies, the latter by Kamisaka Sekka, one of the most creative woodblock artists of the early 20th century.
There was also an amazing 19th-century Japanaese paper stencil, incredibly precise. It was extraordinary how such a delicate item was so little damaged.
Also on display were some of the decorated papers from the Olga Hirsch Collection, including some very striking block prints. Sadly, there were no paste papers on show – apparently, many of the original papers are very fragile. But they are being digitised, so hopefully it will be easier to see them online soon.
Highly entertaining were some bound volumes of The Journal of Design and Manufactures, edited by Henry Cole, first director of what became the Victoria & Albert Museum). The monthly journal included real samples of fabric and wallpaper, as well as numerous illustrations. Its aim was to educate the middle classes about “good taste”, and to this end the tone was often judgmental. This, for example, from a review of printed garment fabrics in 1850:
“The past month has brought us 166 examples of printed goods, and, in spite of all allowances, indulgences, or excuses, which as good-natured, rather than cross-grained critics, we have endeavoured to muster as palliative of our review, we cannot bring ourselves into anything like a good humour with the display for the season now commenced. “
Three calicoes from Thomas Hoyle and Sons in Manchester are merely dismissed as being “vulgar in colouring and form” – they’re the lucky ones. The nine calicoes from Devas and Co in London were not so fortunate: “These may be classed under two heads as regards style; one being printed in two browns and black with a red, the wonderfully like crusty loaves in form, the ‘pattern drawer’s'(!) type in this instance being forsaken for one even worse; and in this respect we do get a novelty certainly.”
Can’t imagine Vogue or World of Interiors being quite so forthright these days!
Alighiero Boetti at Tate Modern
28 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in embroidery, exhibitions Tags: Afghanistan, biro, embroidery, flags, kilims, maps, Tate Modern
Making art from “upcycled” materials and textiles may be very fashionable now, but it’s been around for a while, as a new exhibition at Tate Modern shows.
Alghiero Boetti was born in Turin in 1940, and his first exhibitions featured many of the materials from the industries in the city – car paint from the Fiat plant, a plexiglass cube filled with wonderful contrasting textures of wood offcuts, plastic piping, styrofoam packing, fibreglass and corrugated cardboard. There’s even a classical fluted column made from cake doilies stacked on a metal pole!
But it was when he started taking an interest in travel and geopolitics that textiles came to the fore. After the Six Day War in the Middle East in 1967, he asked his wife to embroider the shapes of the territories occupied by Israel. He also coloured in a school map so that each country was represented by its flag, and took it to Afghanistan, where he commissioned local craftswomen to embroider a larger version. This was the first of his maps, which was done in Bokhara stitch, a very dense but time-consuming couching.
There’s a whole room of these embroidered maps made between 1971 and 1994, and it’s fascinating to see the changes over the years. Early maps used the Mercator projection, where Greenland is the same size as Africa, before switching to a Robinson projection. You can also track political shifts, as the flag of Portugal was replaced by Angola in 1983, and the last map from 1994 loses a great block of red as the former USSR is broken up into a collection of independent states.
The embroidery canvases were designed in Italy and sent to Afghanistan (and later Pakistan) to be embroidered, but Boetti often left gaps for the Afghans to include their own messages, so the borders juxtapose Italian texts with Persian messages about exile, composed by Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
The refugees also wove 50 kilims, some of which are on display. The pattern of these kilims is based on a grid of 100 squares, each of which is also subdivided into 100 squares, or pixels. The corner square starts off as one white pixel and 99 black pixels; the next one is two black pixels and 98 white pixels; the next one is three white pixels and 97 black pixels. So as the number of pixels follows a progression, the colours alternate.
As well as embroidery, Boetti explored lots of other concepts, including postal works using different combinations and patterns of stamps, and a lamp that lights up at random for 11 seconds a year (which didn’t occur during my visit!).
I particularly loved his works produced using biro pens, where individual students covered large sheets of paper with tiny blue strokes of biro. Even though they were all using the same tool, the different styles of mark making are very apparent, punctuated by white commas that encode various phrases. The overall effect reminded me of Japanese indigo dyeing.
The final room is a riot of colour, with three large embroideries called Tutto (Everything). Boetti cut out lots of images from magazines and newspapers and laid them out on canvas so that they all fitted together, then traced around them before sending them off to be embroidered.
There were lots of ideas in this exhibition – about the role of the artist being to explore inefficiency and wasting time, about how artists are expected to be private creators and at the same time public showmen producing spectacle, about creating a new world from pre-existing materials.
Indeed, the final exhibit of Boetti’s bronze self portrait on the balcony shows the artist spraying water onto his head, which conceals a heating mechanism, causing the water to turn to steam and evaporate. As the exhibition guide notes, “he shows himself as a thinker with so many ideas that he needs to cool himself down”.
Alghiero Boetti: Game Plan is at Tate Modern until 27 May 2012.
African hats at the British Museum
23 Jan 2012 1 Comment
in exhibitions Tags: Africa, British Museum, crochet, felt, hats, spider silk, V&A
In the same room as the wonderful Benin plaques at the British Museum is a small display of African hats. No wonder they are easily overlooked.
They include some funky crocheted cotton hats from the Cameroon grasslands:
Also a Tunisian chechia, knitted in 2-ply merino, washed in hot soapy water until it shrinks to half the size (the photo below shows the original knitted hat above and the felted one below):
After felting, the surface of the hat is raised by carding with a tool made from a teasel:
Finally, there’s a fascinating hat made from spiders’ webs, cane, twine and ostrich feathers made by the San people of southern Africa in the early 20th century:
Talking of webs, a new V&A display has just opened that will showcase the world’s largest pieces of cloth made from spider silk. Just as long as they don’t have any of the producers lurking in the corners…
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