A global survey of more than 100 artists, chosen by art-world professionals for their work with threads, stitching, and textiles Celebrating tapestry, embroidery, stitching, textiles, knitting, and knotting as used by visual artists worldwide, Vitamin T is the latest in the celebrated series in which leading curators, critics, and art professionals nominate living artists for inclusion. As boundaries between art and craft have blurred, artists have increasingly embraced these materials and methods, with the resulting works being coveted by collectors and exhibited in museums worldwide. Vitamin T is a vibrant and incredibly timely survey – the first of its kind.
It's a question asked by many budding textile artists: how can I be more creative? You've got a few ideas and know some techniques, but you're not sure how to get started or make your work hang together. This book shows you how. It explains the creative process from the very beginning: where to find inspiration and how to harness those ideas; how to gather source material; how to pull together what you have. The authors then take you on a journey to develop a design. Learn how to put elements together to make a cohesive whole and develop a theme, learning established design rules along the way. Part Three, Moving into Stitch, gives you a range of techniques and easy experiments with which to turn your design into stitched-textile work. From choosing what fabrics to use, to layering, creating texture and adding embellishment, it covers the key techniques to try. This is a terrific book for those starting out in textiles who really do want to be as creative as they can possibly be.
There exist numerous free-standing figurative sculptures produced in Java between the eighth and fifteenth centuries whose dress display detailed textile patterns. This surviving body of sculpture, carved in stone and cast in metal, varying in both size and condition, remains in archaeological sites and museums in Indonesia and worldwide. The equatorial climate of Java has precluded any textiles from this period surviving. Therefore this book argues the textiles represented on these sculptures offer a unique insight into the patterned splendour of the textiles in circulation during this period. This volume contributes to our knowledge of the textiles in circulation at that time by including the first comprehensive record of this body of sculpture, together with the textile patterns classified into a typology of styles within each chapter.
Harness the beauty of the natural world to create unique textile art pieces. Learn how to create beautiful textile art inspired by details in nature in this practical and inspirational guide. Acclaimed textile artist Marian Jazmik shows how to use unusual recycled and repurposed materials combined with traditional fabric and thread. Marian reveals the secrets of her lushly textured and sculptural embroidered pieces, from initial photograph to finished object. Exploring nature as a constant source of inspiration, she shows how to turn a chance spotting of lichen on a tree trunk or a scattering of autumn leaves into glorious textile or mixed-media art. Marian goes on to explore the myriad of techniques she uses in her work, including: How to begin with photography, homing in on details in nature. How to manipulate images to create microscopic and surprising detail. How to translate the images into 3-D work, using an eclectic mix of natural and man-made textiles, as well as unusual recycled materials otherwise be destined for landfill (packaging, plastics and household DIY products). Hand and machine embroidery. Dyeing, printing and painting. Using heat gun and soldering iron to create heavily textured surfaces. Packed with practical tips, inspiration and illustrated throughout with glorious examples of Marian’s work, this book will provide you with endless imaginative ideas for distilling the wonders of nature into your own textile art.
In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.
Transform your ideas on creative fabric embellishment for textile art that's full meaning and astounding texture, in this inspiring book by award-winning textile art tutor and artist Jan Dowson. Whether it's a landscape, a garden, an animal or a powerful memory of a place or object, Jan shows you how she develops them all into beautifully stitched representations that exude awe-inspiring detail, colour and expression. Discover Jan's unique sketchbook process, where she stores and collects natural items, and explores different patterns, textures, media and markings to cultivate her final design. See her simple yet effective methods for transforming her fabric for stitching, including dyeing, embellishing and stamping. Then, watch her transform an unassuming square of fabric into a contemporary piece of art brimming with colour, texture and extraordinary stitched markings - all made through the combination of traditional sewing techniques and other media. Following a fascinating, illustrated step-by step chapter on Jan's key techniques, join her as she takes you through the stages of three types of work for which she is most renowned - the stitched landscape, the memory cloth and the bird sculpture. Each project also includes a break down of the materials, tools and techniques used, so that can understand as well as see the development of her astounding, mixed-media creations. Throughout the book, a gallery of Jan's work complements her techniques and projects, showing how to truly push the limits on your stitcheries. These are stunning pieces that will open your eyes and turn your own creative concepts into original, personal work.
Sculpture is no longer limited to materials like stone or metal. Sculpting in fabric is shown in ingenious detail here, with more than 350lavish photographs of 3-D cloth configurations along with insightful profiles of the 78artists who created them. The images and text capture the currents that are powering these works, like the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement established in the 1990s and the current revival of the revolutionary sculptural cloth of the 1960s. Works are approached through five themes: investigating nature, capturing the ephemeral, playing with space, telling a story, and "Take Heed." In her foreword, renowned fiber art expert Josephine Stealey helps us put this art form in context, from its origins in 1880 England's arts and craft movement to today. This is essential reading and inspiration for collectors, students, home artists, and anyone who appreciates innovative artwork.
