Category: Craft
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Weaving in Greymouth Māwhera
Once upon a time, tweed was briefly woven on the West Coast of Te Waipounamu/ the South Island. The cloth was useful in the cool, damp climate of the Coast but it had to be imported from elsewhere. The tweed that was woven in Hokitika – you can see an example here – was similar…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Showing and Telling
Over the past year I have been running a series of events connected with the textile collection. The collection includes costume (the photograph left is a detail from an Adire robe from Nigeria, and the image below is a detail from Heather Barnett’s “Formanifera” curtains. These events have been held (mostly) in the local Regent…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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Conversation and Cloth
This coming Friday is the next instalment of our monthly series of textile talks. Conversation and Cloth is a series that explores the textile collection that is housed upstairs at the Regent Theatre in Māwhera Greymouth. This time we are going to be looking at how art and artists are represented in the collection. It…