Tuesday 27 January 2015

Contemporary weaving

I've enjoyed looking at several contemporary artists who weave in a wide range of ways.

Chris Drury is a British environmental artist. His body of work includes ephemeral assemblies of natural materials,  as well as more-permanent landscape art, works on paper, and indoor installations. He also works on 3D sculptures (three-dimensional). (Wikipedia)

Air Vessel, willow, 1994. I love this carefully constructed piece, which I find quite beautiful for its simplicity.
He often uses natural materials, for example cow dung, to bind and glue. 

Alps/Jura, woven papers, 1996. Again, carefully and cleverly constructed, making patterns interweaving two maps.

Tadek Beutlich, a Polish artist, died 3 years ago at the age of 88. In the early 1960s, he made flat-weave tapestries inspired by folk art and continental modernism. He then began to experiment, creating weavings such as Moon (pictured), which included charred wood, seed pods and X-ray film. Moon was shown in the Victoria and Albert Museum's 1965 exhibition Weaving for Walls: Modern British Wall Hangings and Rugs. Two years later, his book The Technique of Woven Tapestry was published. It is still considered indispensable by weavers all over the world. (Wikipedia)


Crowds gathering. This is so clever - woven people! 


An off the loom piece



Novija Radjovic - I can't find where I came across this weaving - on the internet - have googled the name and had no results, maybe I wrote the name down wrongly when I first came across it. Such intricate, beautiful weaving!




Justine Ashbee is a contemporary weaver based in both Seattle and Brighton. She uses muted, natural colours. She hand weaves on a jack loom, uses fine fibre and precious metal. I love them for their simplicity, the hanging threads, the muted colours. (I don't know the names of all these pieces).








Alicia Scardetta is from Texas, her work, heavily influenced by colour, is part tapestry, part friendship bracelet.



Alice Fox is a contemporary textile artist whose work I have been following for a couple of years, on FB and on her blog. She uses rust to stain paper and fabric, working with the environment, using natural, muted colours. She has recently begun to weave.

Her hand weavings are simply beautiful, she writes that they have taken her months.

She has stained her weaving with walnut ink - "The walnut ink was applied with a roller. I knew there would be some unevenness and I like that unpredictability. The ink catches the surface of the weave, revealing the pattern of lines where the weft rolls onto the surface and then leaves it again".


Maryanne Moodie