Tag: art

  • The Coast Salish Woolly Dog

    The Pacific Northwest of Canada and the United States has a long tradition of weaving practised by the Coast Salish people. Many readers might be familiar with the blankets and cloaks that incorporate colour and pattern distinctive to the region. What you may not know is that some of those pieces might have been made…

  • Of shearing and songs

    In April 1956, the magazine Te Ao Hou,offered an article to its readership about Tuini Ngāwai, the Māori musician, teacher, shearer and cultural ambassador. Tuini Moetū Haangū Ngāwai was born in 1910 and survived her twin, Te Huinga, to become one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most well-known and respected songwriters. She was also an accomplished…

  • How technology can help Cantonese opera

    In the city of Hong Kong the centuries-old art of Cantonese opera is making use of technology to help students to learn the artform and sustain it. Professor Leung Bo Wah, Head of Cultural and Creative Art at the Education University of Hong Kong, has created a virtual reality programme, using the same 3D imaging…

  • Melissa Cody

    The traditional, ancient craft of Navajo weaving has been the passion and lifework of Melissa Cody. Now showing in New York at MoMA PS1, “Webbed Skies” is the work of the past decade; an exploration of a weaving history from Germantown, Pennsylvania that used reclaimed threads from woollen blankets given to displaced Navajo people by…

  • Showing and Telling

    Over the past year I have been running a series of events connected with the textile collection. The collection includes costume (the photograph left is a detail from an Adire robe from Nigeria, and the image below is a detail from Heather Barnett’s “Formanifera” curtains. These events have been held (mostly) in the local Regent…

  • Feedback on the blog

    Many thanks to everyone who responded to last week’s request for feedback. It is appreciated. Some things readers said… Phew! That is a good amount of great feedback, isn’t it? There are some things that people have suggested might make the blog better to read. These are technical things such as the placement of the…

  • Faith Ringgold

    Faith Ringgold spent more than fifty years exploring and explaining. This classically-trained sculptor and painter used her energies to fight inequality through art, in particular “story quilts”, unstretched canvases painted with acrylics and bordered with pieced fabric. These pieces told the stories of Black lives, particularly of women, and celebrate “the human capacity to transcend…

  • The seas around us

    The textile artist Erik Speer uses waste, old stock and ends of line materials to explore an ocean of possibilities. With a degree in marine biology, it is no surprise that the artist’s work focuses on marine life. By using a variety of techniques and materials, Erik creates sculptures that look like coral reefs, sponges…

  • The Sony World Photography Awards

    The winners of the prestigious Sony World Photography Awards have just been announced. To see the images head on over to the BBC website here. The Photographer of the Year is Juliette Pavy with Spiralkampagnen, a documentary series about the forced sterilisation of Inuit women in Greenland. Several thousand girls and women were fitted with…

  • An ancient Chinese scroll animated

    This week the next in the series of Conversation and Cloth talks took place in the Regent Theatre in Māwhera Greymouth. This time the theme was Art and Artists and clothes, costumes, fabrics and decorative items were all part of the show-and-tell. There were books to go along with the talk too. The series focuses…