Category: Textiles

  • Jean-Claude Bissery

    A new window display for autumn features a printed hanging by the French artist, Jean-Claude Bissery. Known for his use of vibrant colour and design, the piece hanging in the studio is entitled “Boucheron”, which translates as “woodcutter”. In the image a man strides through a forest filled with autumnal leaves, carrying a cut tree…

  • The first cloth

    The first cloth ever for the West Coast Cloth Company is nearly ready to come off the loom. The warp and weft in this cloth is Jamieson’s yarn from Shetland, the last of the cones that I brought over when we moved to the West Coast. I was inspired by the colours of the Coast,…

  • Review: Nature’s Symphony

    A current exhibition, Nature’s Symphony, by Marilyn Rea-Menzies at the Left Bank Art Gallery in Māwhera/ Greymouth features tapestries, drawings and paintings, each one an exploration of the colours and textures of the forests of the Coast. Rea-Menzies works diligently and with intelligence, both emotional and cerebral, a discipline that began in childhood in the…

  • Fighting gender imbalance… with knitting?

    In Denmark knitting is making a political statement. Huzzah!

  • New books in the library

    A lovely donation from a reader of the blog has given the library four books. Traditional and Modern Batik is the 1982 English translation of a Dutch book from 1977 by Miep Spee. As the textile collection features cloths from Asia and Africa that reflect the Javanese traditions of wax batik this is a very…

  • Philippine woven textiles

    This week a Canadian visitor to the studio mentioned the intriguing banana fibre textiles from the Philippine Islands. The oldest known of these pieces in the world dates back to the 13th or 14th Century. It is an ikat cloth (as you can see on this link) and was found on Banton Island in 1936.…

  • Threads of Belonging

    A new temporary public art show is about to be installed in South Sacramento’s Valley Hi-North Laguna Library. The textiles mural is an homage to the immigrant communities of the area, HMong, Filipinx/a/o, and Palestinians, who have contributed to the living history of the Californian capital city. The art work is combined with workshops and…

  • The Long White Cloud

    In 1980 Douglas Chowns, a Northland artist, was commissioned to create a mural for the New Zealand Council for Educational Research for their 50th anniversary. A unique hand-printed mixed media piece was the result: The Long White Cloud. This kinetic sculptural piece was inspired by the artist’s life in Northland since 1972 with stars, bones…

  • Cataloguing the textile collection

    As regular readers of the blog will know the textile collection is in the process of being correctly stored and researched, thanks to volunteers. Some real treasures are being unearthed while this work is going on and one of those is a hunger cloth by the charity Misereor. In 1976 Misereor reinvigorated the “Poor Man’s…

  • Stansborough

    The farm of Stansborough is a diverse enterprise that includes a rare breed of sheep, woven cloth and a whole lot of dedication. Stansborough uses old looms to produce cloth. These looms are the oldest of their kind still in use in the world – they were made in the 1890s – and the fabric…