Category: Textiles

  • Living the ancient high life

    A recent and surprising discovery has been uncovered in the high altitudes of Uzbekistan’s southeastern mountains. The region was long thought to have been uninhabited because of the problems with living at such altitudes but this discovery, made using lidar, the remote sending technology that uses reflected light to map out surroundings in three dimensions,…

  • Emily Van Hoff’s playful quilts

    Graphic designer, Emily Van Hoff, has come up with a new line of quilting fabrics. The new fabrics have been created for Moda Fabrics and will be available next year. Until then have a look at the artist’s quilts that combine weaving with sculptural techniques and colour to explore materials and their possibilities. See more:…

  • So she was turned to a pillar of salt

    Jo Rogge, an artist who lives between South Africa and Namibia, is non-binary and creates work that comments and highlights social issues that they have experienced. In this show, just ended in Windhoek’s “The Project Room” in Namibia, Rogge’s repurposed textiles take their place alongside visual art. The textiles are found pieces that have been…

  • The Spotify playlist

    Each week a selection of music is curated to go along with the blog. The playlist can be heard on the player above or by heading over to Spotify and searching for “Music to read a blog by”. The selections have something to do with the entries on the blog. Depending on the listener’s subscription…

  • Aboriginal art in New York

    Aboriginal art celebrates the land, for it is through painting, singing and dancing that the land can express and become itself. A show in New York’s Asia Society of seventy-four pieces includes video to provide a context to the beautiful artwork – bark paintings (not all on bark) – on display until January 2025. Seventy-four…

  • Hawaiian quilts and island ecology

    A new book has just been published by Common Threads that explores fifteen contemporary quilts and their relationship to the ecology of Hawai’i. Marenka Thompson-Odlum, a Research Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford leads a project to enhance the Museum’s collections, commission new work and develop relationships with communities represented in the…

  • Italy in New Zealand

    Italian fashion is going to hit the Greymouth screen. Next month the Regent Theatre in Māwhera Greymouth is hosting the Cinema Italiano Festival/ Italian Film Festival. This event is in its ninth year and the lineup, according to its artistic director, Paolo Rotondo, is one of the strongest yet. One of the films to be…

  • Cataloguing and photographing the textile collection

    The studio in Greymouth Māwhera is continuing to evolve as more pieces are added to the collection and as we prepare the space for the equipment to come over from the UK. At the back of the space is a storage area and that is where the textile collection, which includes the piece below from…

  • CuzyT

    The recent trip to the Costume and Textile Association of Aotearoa New Zealand symposium in Whangārei included a surprising discovery. The North of the North Island/ Te Ika-a-Māui is home to Tāne Mahuta, the giant kauri tree. To get to it from the East Coast one travels across the island on a meandering road that…

  • A new use for newspaper

    Newspaper has a new lease of life in the work of South African Tamlin Blake. Tamlin Blake’s art is concerned with the ways in which materials can be used and reused. In her most recent work, newspaper is hand-spun into yarn that is then used to create tapestries. Presenting this material alongside mosaics and embroideries…