Sometimes you don't get around to seeing or hearing about things until it's too late. Such is the case with the exhibition, "The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End," held last October 2008 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
Surface Design Association presents its
2009 International Textile Conference:
Kansas City, Missouri, USA
Kansas City Art Institute and Marriott Country Club Plaza
Translated from Italian, “dare alla luce” is an idiomatic expression for giving birth: “to give to the light.” Excerpted from website:
Through countless small gestures of her craft, Greer employs humble handicraft processes and materials, executing her work through crochet, braiding, sewing and beading processes that use yarn, beads, shells, feathers and more. Merging the mythical and the mundane, Greer collapses the language and materials of the ordinary with the spectacular and the epic. The resulting work intertwines objects and space, resulting in an exuberant, sensual and visceral installation.
For more information, read here
Vive le Shibori!
This workshop is inspired by a group of Japanese folk textile and clothing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as padded sleeping mattresses and comforters, fishermans coats, lumberjacks vests, and other everyday wear. These were dyed in indigo and extensively patched and darned as necessary, utilizing regional resources to the limit.In my forthcoming book, I am using the Japanese term boro to define a new aesthetic and to bring new meaning to an alternative creative process, e.g., darning = healing, meditative action = marking time, reuse/repair = recording history. "Boro" represents the transformation of inconsequential material to something precious and valuable. Ordinarily, these tattered, castaway rags and the articles pieced together from them would be considered of little to no value. Boro, on the other hand, are viewed as beautiful in a way that defies convention. This type of imperfect beauty possesses a power that resonates with people almost like an emotional barometer. It points to an alternative value of "beauty" slowly coming to surface in our social consciousness.
