Category: Textiles

  • This week’s Spotify playlist

    Each week a playlist of audio is compiled and curated to go with the articles in the blog. The tracks have something to do with the blog entries and you can read about the links in a separate article on the blog. To listen to the playlist click on the player above or head over…

  • DY Begay’s Sublime Light

    The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian is currently hosting a show of tapestries by fibre artist DY Begay. In these works the artist explores her birthplace and home of Tsélaní on the Navajo Nation reservation through beautifully rendered land and skyscape interpretations in colour and texture. Sublime Light is on until July 13th…

  • The spectacular art of Khatija Possum

    The third generation of painters in her family, Khatija Possum is the granddaughter of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, a founding artist of the contemporary indigenous art movement in Australia. The artist uses Aboriginal ancestry as influences in her work, portraying the landscape through concentric circles that represent human activity, small dots and circles standing in for…

  • The historic woolsheds of Aotearoa

    New Zealand, at least by measurement of human habitation, is a young country and any building more than a century old is considered to be venerable. Meet New Zealand’s woolsheds… The history of wool in Aotearoa dates back to the very first introduction of sheep in 1773 by Captain James Cook. This first event was…

  • You’re Still Here

    It is a commonality, losing someone, but we all experience that loss uniquely. Sometimes that experience is celebratory, joy for a full life. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is quiet and peaceful. Sometimes it is not. Whatever the circumstances we often want to mark the occasion. In this project, You’re Still Here, Rebecca Godderis…

  • Iris van Herpen

    Iris van Herpen, the Dutch fashion designer, has just completed a show in Brisbane: Sculpting the Senses. The original show in Paris in 2023 provided the inspiration for the Australian exhibition, which included film, visual art, sculpture, photography and installations as well as the designer’s interpretations of the surrounding worlds around her. Thanks to a…

  • This week’s Spotify playlist

    Each week the blog features a playlist that relates to its entries. The playlist is hosted on Spotify and you can listen to the audio on the player above or by heading over to Spotify on the Web or in the platform’s app. A search for “Music to read a blog by” will bring up…

  • An evolution for the blog

    Recently a reader asked about the links between the Spotify playlist and the articles on the blog. Each of the pieces that is on the playlist has something to do with the articles, but sometimes the links are not obvious and that led to this reader asking “What is the link?”. So, for those of…

  • Brides by Yvonne Todd

    Yvonne Todd, a New Zealander who works in photography, has just ended a show at the Dowse Art Gallery in Pōneke Wellington: Brides. In this exhibition the artist has created portraits of brides that look like real wedding photographs. Close inspection however reveals that they are anything but. Instead they are surreal and witty takes…

  • The South Sea Islanders

    In 1863 a group of 67 labourers arrived in Brisbane, the first of 62,000 people from 80 Melanesian islands who endured forced migration to provide cheap labour to Australia’s cotton and sugar industries. This influx of people, which lasted until 1904, brought a new dynamic to the country, but many of the recent arrivals were…