Category: Craft

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • This week’s Spotify playlist

    Each blog is accompanied by a Spotify playlist, a curated selection of audio that relates in some way to the blog and, occasionally, to current events, such as this week’s eclipse. Paid subscribers to Spotify will hear all the songs in the playlist on the player above or in your own app while free subscriptions…

  • Textiles from the Indian Subcontinent

    If you have ever fancied learning something about the fascinating textiles from India check out a free online course. Run by the MAP Academy the course is just one of the variety on offer that include art history, sculpture, archeology and architecture. This course looks at textiles, through videos, illustrations and texts, in their broad…

  • The wild weather

    This week the South Island Te Waipounamu of Aotearoa New Zealand is experiencing some dramatic weather. One of the things I loved about living in Shetland was the drama of the weather. Huge storms, wind and rain, snow and sunshine; it is always changing and that made the light interesting and good for inspiration for…

  • Yarn at Reefton

    On Tuesday the 21st May Reefton is holding its annual fibre day. This year the theme is “Journeys in Yarn” and the speakers will be talking about their experiences as crafters and artists, or about trips they have taken because of their love of yarn. The event is on from 10m until 3pm and there…

  • Chromite

    Chromite is an ore that contains the mineral “chrome”, used to make colourfast dyes and paints. In the 19th Century chrome was recognised as a useful mordant for wool dyeing and for leather tanning. It was widely used to make the colour “Chrome Green” for artists and is still in use today. Chromite was mined…