Category: Textiles
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Embroidery and oils
Daniela García Hamilton, a first-generation American of Mexican descent, uses threads and oil paints to explain her family relationships. In the artist’s hands, photographic portraits and everyday scenes act as catalysts for paintings with an addition of embroidery. Each stitch illuminates the picture, adding depth, and the care with which the images are embellished reminds…
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Blankets
What better to have around in the cold winter weather than a blanket or two… In the Southern African country of Lesotho, high up in the mountains of the Drakensberg, woollen blankets have been worn for more than a century and a half. The largest manufacturer, Aranda Textile Mills, was appointed by the royal family…
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A Guatemalan Huipil
Huipiles are part of the clothing worn by Mayan women in Guatemala. The intricacy of the decoration and the often-vibrant colours of huipiles have long made the garments admired and sought after. This is, after all, one of the best-known of the South American textile traditions. These pieces embody tradition and history, as well as…
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Soft Power
Soft Power, lives told through textile art is currently on in the UK at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. This exhibition has been curated by Professors Alice Kettle and Lesley Millar and relates the stories of people through textiles. Sometimes those stories are intimate and closely bound to an individual, sometimes they are…
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Kiribati armour
The Republic of Kiribati is not on many travel itineraries but it has a fascinating culture, including the wearing of intricate and somewhat alarming armour! The body armour of Kiribati (pronounced “Kiribas”) is held in museum collections around the world. The outfits consist of a full-body suit of woven coconut fibre accompanied by a neck…
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Operation Wrapped in Remembrance
This year there are a number of significant wartime anniversaries. It is 80 years since the end of World War Two, 75 years since the start of the Korean War, 65 years since the end of the Malayan Emergency and 50 years since the Vietnam War ended. A New Zealand project has been created to…
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Reader submissions
Shikoku Fukumoto is a Japanese artist who explores shibori and indigo dyeing in her ethereal, sometimes eerie, and beautiful textile installations. She studied art at Kyoto City University of Arts before turning to fabric and colour and her work has been seen in Japan, the USA, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, and is in…
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Egypt and the Singer Sewing machine
The Singer company specialised in making stylish sewing machines that graced the home. Originally called I. M. Singer & Co., the Singer Company produced the first practical sewing machine for domestic use. The company started in 1851 and quickly grew until it was the largest producer in the world of these machines. Old Singer sewing…
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Campbell Island’s Shetlanders
In the early 20th Century an attempt was made to farm sheep on Campbell Island (Moto Ihupuku) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Campbell Island lies in the subantarctic, 400 or so miles south of Te Waipounamu/ the South Island. It is windswept, and mountainous, and is almost bisected by a long fiord called Perseverance Harbour that…
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Reader submissions
The first indigenous woman to ever study at Oxford University will receive a posthumous degree. Mākereti Papakura, a pioneering Māori scholar, matrucalted in 1927 to read Anthropology at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Society of Home Students. She explored the customs of her iwi (tribal group) from Te Arawa as seen from a female…