Category: Craft

  • Samba!

    Brazil is known for its vibrant cultures and the samba is amongst the most well-known; Samba de Roda, a festival event from Bahia, is recognised as a unique art form in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Samba derives from the colonial period in Brazil’s history. At its foundation are the traditions and cultures of enslaved…

  • The extraordinary music from Malaita

    Disclaimer: Please be aware that some of the links in this article may show images of human remains, currently in museum collections. The people of the Southern part of Malaita, the largest land in the Solomon Islands, are called the ‘Are’are. Until an ethnomusicologist called Hugo Zemp from le Musée de l’Homme in Paris recorded…

  • Walter Oltmann’s Wire Tapestry

    The South African artist, Walter Oltmann, is known for his exploration of prehistory through experimentation with materials. Oltmann uses various materials, including cloth, thread, wire and paint, to reveal hidden stories. The studio collection has an embroidery of a coelacanth, a favourite subject for the artist, and the art collection has two watercolours of people…

  • This week’s Spotify playlist

    Each week a playlist is curated to go along with the blog. The pieces on the playlist refer to articles on the blog, sometimes obviously and sometimes more obliquely. To listen, click on the player above. If you have a paid subscription to Spotify you will hear all the pieces uninterrupted. Free subscriptions will have…

  • Data and textiles

    One of the joys of a textile practice is learning about the different uses to which textiles are put. Data visualisation is one of those. Data is a current trend in textile art. The use of cloths and fabrics, threads and yarns, embroidery, knitting, weaving, patchwork and quilting, is allowing new viewpoints to be seen.…

  • Update on the new studio

    The new studio space in Māwhera Greymouth is slowly taking shape. Over the next few months we will be adding equipment, art and materials to the space. The plan is to be open in time for next winter with workshops and activities, all centred around textiles. Longer term we will be running residencies and stays,…

  • Yto Barrada

    Yto Barrada is a Moroccan artist who lives between Tangier and New York. The artist uses, in her work, natural dyes and has created a garden estate, “The Mothership“, near Tangier, to explore dyeing with these materials. In a recent exhibition at the Pace Gallery in London, entitled “How to Plan a Garden”, Barrada made…

  • The Garden Egg Chair updated

    At the moment the art collection is being catalogued and research is ongoing about the pieces, including an original red Egg Chair. Designed in the late 1960s by Peter Ghyczy, this iconic piece of furniture was made in what was then the divided countries of East and West Germany. This article on the Victoria and…

  • All about poi

    You might be familiar with the Māori art of “poi“, the dextrous dance movements that use balls on cord. According to some, poi was once used by men to strengthen their wrists for battle but nowadays it is used to demonstrate skill. These poi are made from plastic covering an inner core of foam or…

  • Elizabeth Talford Scott

    The craft of creating quilts became an art in the hands of Elizabeth Talford Scott. Born into a family of sharecroppers in South Carolina, Scott was the sixth of fourteen children who lived on the plantation. With so many people to feed and clothe it was imperative that any resources were reused and she was…