Category: Art

  • The Coast Salish Woolly Dog

    The Pacific Northwest of Canada and the United States has a long tradition of weaving practised by the Coast Salish people. Many readers might be familiar with the blankets and cloaks that incorporate colour and pattern distinctive to the region. What you may not know is that some of those pieces might have been made…

  • How technology can help Cantonese opera

    In the city of Hong Kong the centuries-old art of Cantonese opera is making use of technology to help students to learn the artform and sustain it. Professor Leung Bo Wah, Head of Cultural and Creative Art at the Education University of Hong Kong, has created a virtual reality programme, using the same 3D imaging…

  • Melissa Cody

    The traditional, ancient craft of Navajo weaving has been the passion and lifework of Melissa Cody. Now showing in New York at MoMA PS1, “Webbed Skies” is the work of the past decade; an exploration of a weaving history from Germantown, Pennsylvania that used reclaimed threads from woollen blankets given to displaced Navajo people by…

  • Venice and the Biennale

    Since 1895 La Biennale di Venezia has been promoting art in its many forms. This year the theme, Stranieri ovunque/ Foreigners everywhere, has led to prestigious awards for Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. The Golden Lion for the Best Participant in the International Exhibition has been won by Mataaho Collective. This quartet of Māori wāhine…

  • Faith Ringgold

    Faith Ringgold spent more than fifty years exploring and explaining. This classically-trained sculptor and painter used her energies to fight inequality through art, in particular “story quilts”, unstretched canvases painted with acrylics and bordered with pieced fabric. These pieces told the stories of Black lives, particularly of women, and celebrate “the human capacity to transcend…

  • The seas around us

    The textile artist Erik Speer uses waste, old stock and ends of line materials to explore an ocean of possibilities. With a degree in marine biology, it is no surprise that the artist’s work focuses on marine life. By using a variety of techniques and materials, Erik creates sculptures that look like coral reefs, sponges…

  • This week’s Spotify playlist

    Each week a Spotify list is curated to go along with the blog. Each piece on the list is relevant to the blog entries, with a mix of old and new music and sound from across the globe. Those with a Spotify subscription will be able to listen to the entire playlist without interruption, those…

  • The Sony World Photography Awards

    The winners of the prestigious Sony World Photography Awards have just been announced. To see the images head on over to the BBC website here. The Photographer of the Year is Juliette Pavy with Spiralkampagnen, a documentary series about the forced sterilisation of Inuit women in Greenland. Several thousand girls and women were fitted with…

  • An ancient Chinese scroll animated

    This week the next in the series of Conversation and Cloth talks took place in the Regent Theatre in Māwhera Greymouth. This time the theme was Art and Artists and clothes, costumes, fabrics and decorative items were all part of the show-and-tell. There were books to go along with the talk too. The series focuses…

  • Abdoulaye Konaté

    Abdoulaye Konaté is an artist from Mali who uses textiles to comment on politics and environment. In his large-scale works the artist stitches cloths together to create colourful and powerful pieces that reflect Mali’s rich heritage and culture of cloth and music, as in this show, Symphonie en couleur, held in London in 2022.