Guest edited by Janyce Denise Glasper
… Issue Sixteen: TEXT
Guest edited by Janyce Denise Glasper
… Issue Sixteen: TEXT“Home Is A Concept explores homes beyond borders through capturing people’s connection with each other and nature. These photos and prints are documentations of home as where I currently live (Vermont, U.S.A.), and where I am from (Suzhou, China).
… Spotlight: Home Is A ConceptTexts, images and objects – are all made up of animate and inanimate ‘beings’ that live inside of us as well as outside, and inside of each other like nested dolls…
… Essay: Image/Text/Object & the BODYJulia Mallory shares her series of capes, created to ‘tell stories about ‘tell stories about Black folks’ relationship to labor, leisure, and loss’…
… My Cape is Hanging Somewhere in a MuseumThe relationship between text and textiles is writ large at this perfectly crafted exhibition…
… Interview: ‘Poets in Vogue’ with Sarah Parker and Sophie OliverGlimpse inside of a Bruno Munari inspired poetry art book by J.A. Pak…
… Thirteen Variations of “Brief Love”Caroline Harris dives into the experimental world of visual poetry…
… Vibrant ecosystems of poetic makingIsaac Fravashi argues that through poetry ‘Emin’s applique work builds meaning that is both personal and political’…
… The Confessions of Tracey EminGuest edited by matt lambert
… Issue Fifteen: Tools, Use, MasteryMultiWeave is a textile tool, technique and research project. The textiles that can be made with the tool are characterized by the potential to make sculptural objects. Matilda Dominique and Maja Gunn reflect on using the tool…
… A reflection on the MultiWeave toolPoetic reflections on making by Aaron Decker
… Poetry: Toys / Stripes / ClosetJewelry and object making…
… Spotlight: Haydee AlonsoLooking at durrie (flat woven rug) weaving traditions across India, this article by Chandrashekhar Bheda finds an amazing diversity of looms and tools with varied pre-weaving processes, and corresponding ways of working on each of the different looms.
… Weaving through the traditions and techniques of rug-making in IndiaWhat if we could tell a different story, Seth C. Bruggeman asks. What if we looked for inspiration in craft and cognitive science and object theory? What if we could write a history of labor and embodied knowledge that shows how skill itself is a survival strategy, one that we all share because it is literally built into each of our bodies?
… Teaching Historians with Tools: Toward a Subversive PedagogyHow does one attribute citation to the lived experience? As an editor, Adriane N. Dalton reflects on the role of affirming or diminishing the tacit knowledge of lived experiences by asking for a citation…
… When am I the tool and when am I the material?Stephanie Frondoso explores the invisible work by artist Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, bringing focus to the invisible labor behind works of art that use discarded objects from studios, workshops and the supply stores that Ramilo frequents.
… Debris: Christina Quisumbing Ramilo‘Handles, handled. Liking how they feel in hand is justification enough’. Judith Leemann has been collecting old handles for years – this essay examines what makes them a tool.
… to stay the graspWhile crafting, the tool and the body unite to act, respond, and sense all the time. Bilge Merve Aktaş reflects on how this unification turns the body into a tool and the tool into the body, both embedding activeness and aliveness while facilitating interactions and translating performances.
… Bodies in felting as tools for travelling across time and spaceMerel Noorlander on how multiple render techniques, sound design, queer communities, sex coaches, and projection mapping transform site specific places of everyday life…
… Cruising Kink Gates: 4D as a socio-political activationJeff Peachey asks: What really goes on in an embodied state? Could it be reconstructed, or at least some the complexities described retrospectively? Here are some of the decisions and actions that become take place during the embodied activity of paring leather…
… On Tool Embodimentby guest editor Kate Devine
How is it that we come to know something or more particularly, how to do something? We may imbibe the words of others, learn by watching a skilled example, learn through our own trial and error, or discover something within ourselves. How then, do we pass on that knowledge? Through stories, through instruction, through play? It can be hard to teach something ‘you just know’.
… Editorial #14: Craft, Teaching, and KnowledgeRoaming the Rates Rebellion[1] is an online zine and audio walking tour created by Emily Stone and Jodie Adams. Find out more about how the zine was created first by hand, telling the story of the rebellion through handmade collage and handwritten text which was scanned into a digital format…
… Roaming the Rates Rebellion: Crafting a Digital ZineWith a population today of just 275 people, Gee’s Bend is a small, isolated hamlet with a complex history. Surrounded on three sides by the Alabama river, it was once a cotton plantation, originally established by Joseph Gee and then later owned by Mark Pettway. As direct descendants of the slaves and subsequent sharecroppers who worked on the land throughout the 19th and 20th Century, the majority of those who live in Gee’s Bend continue to share the Pettway name.[1]
… Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee’s BendThere are many aspects that one takes for granted when you’re a craftsperson. Drawing myself back to my first days holding a saw or understanding how pliers work, to the more complicated matter of how silver reacts under hammer and fire, I appreciate something that now comes naturally to me, but may not necessarily for others. I take care not to do the work for my students, using words to convey what to do. Sometimes it’s not easy with a craft that’s so tacit and engrained.
… Teaching Craft: a Silversmith’s StoryCraft allows you to question your materials and understand them. My work revolves around cherishing discarded garments and recognizing them as materials to make with, thus increasing their lifespan. It evokes a realisation of the distant nature of humans with their garments.
… Practice-Based: Megha Menon, the Craft of Un-MakingEmbroidery is about making visible. It is the adornment of cloth to add meaning and value. As such, it is about identity – making a claim about who you are, and displaying that for others to see. This is both personal and political, and nowhere is this more true than in the modern Middle East.
… “Embroidery is integral to our being”: the role of Arabic tatreez in knowing who you are and where you are fromTouch has made its way into our everyday turns of phrase; it has dissolved into our vocabulary, the way we relate to the world around us. Both in this abstract sense and literally, often in the form of banal and daily gestures, touch is an invisible and inescapable part of our day-to-day. Such is the ubiquity of touch that we can choose to ignore its importance, until it is brought into question.
… An Epistemics of Touch: The Conglomerate Tactile Trash Object ProjectFigures 1 and 2. Elinor at a Homemade knitting machine workshop for children. Image: Elnaz Yazdani
Are you wearing something knitted today? Given the broad array of knitted fabrics on the market and the recent lockdown trend for comfort dressing, we’d say it’s very likely – but did you know your clothes were knitted? We have been involved with either teaching about or creating knitting on knitting machines for over 15 years and we often forget that once upon a time we didn’t know that so much of our clothing was knitted.
… “Put your hand up if you’re wearing something knitted!”Existing on the tentative line between the mediums of photography and applied craft, lens-based artist and educator Nilupa Yasmin’s work is an intricate reconstruction of both art forms. As she pieces together personal stories from the different communities that she encounters, her work is in a constant state of unravelling, where she continues to discover her place within the warp of the world. Focusing on the two strands of community and self, her woven photographic work delicately displays that one cannot exist without the other.
… Meet Nilupa Yasmin: the Artist Using Craft and Photography to Weave Together CommunitiesPerhaps more so than any other art form, wearable art is the place where the decorative becomes most dissident. Costume amplifies the inherently expressive nature of the clothes we choose (or are forced) to wear; it is a powerful and accessible medium to tell stories about who we are, who we want to be, and the nature of our relationship to the society we live in.
… Issue Thirteen: Wearable ArtA blazer and a skirt flutter in the wind at Pett Level beach in Hastings. On it are pictures of a man and a woman, across time, sown into the fabric and glazed with glue. Words travel through the garment in embroidery and the pink tulle skirt reads: my own darling (image right). As an image, it presents a ghostly figure, embodied by the movement in the wind and the stories woven into the textile.
… Stitching over history, memory and collective joy – Stephanie Francis-Shanahan’s living sculpturesÝrúrarí’s mostly knit-based practice see fragments of humour, body movements and the everyday meet in wool based, wearable objects.
… Monster Sweaters: in conversation with ÝrúraríThe iconoclastic and ultra-provocative costumes of the avant-garde visual artist, electrifying poet, model performer, and dramatically titled Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874 – 1927) were Greenwich Village legend.
… ‘Like an Empress from Another Planet’: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s couture d’orduresBREAKING THE FALL
Breaking the Fall is a collaboration with my mother, Cherrie Beaney. It is an exploration of our practices of care, attending to how illness (in this case, epilepsy) impacts my mother, and how I, in turn am affected. Specifically, the concept of ‘control’ within care arose as a subject with affective resonances for each of us.
… Breaking the Fall, Emily BeaneyArtist and art historian Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie in conversation with artist Ben Caro.
… Ben Caro on performative masculinity, activating objects, and historyFinding out more about New’s series Aliens of Manila (2014-), a multi-disciplinary work that explores the experience of immigration and cultural displacement through costume, performance and installation.
… Dressing the Aliens of Manila: Elisabetta Garletti in Conversation with Leeroy NewMore gems on the theme of Wearable Art to read / listen / watch in the next few months….
… RecommendedThe messages and images embroidered in these aprons are associated with the urgent need to make the high levels of gender-based violence visible and question and contest our society’s patriarchal structure and severe social inequalities.
… ‘La trato como reina [I treat her like a queen]’, Daniela Lara-EspinozaElevating everyday materials such as glass, brass and copper, Smith’s designs revelled in the handmade aspects of jewellery making as he hammered and soldered offcuts and shaped metal into new, biomorphic forms.
… Art Smith’s Modernist JewelleryDraped closely over its wearer, Elsa Schiaparelli’s Tears Dress is the quintessence of couture. The bias-cut gown, now an off-white, was originally pale blue and clings to the body like a second, otherworldly, skin.
… Schiaparelli, Surrealism and the Society WomanAlthough Scottish artist, designer and teacher Jessie M. King (1875-1949) is probably most celebrated for her delicate and often whimsical illustrative work, this short article will focus on her clothing designs and dissemination of knowledge via her how-to-publication How Cinderella went to the Ball (1924).
… Wrapped up in a fairy tale: Jessie M. King and the production of wearable designsPersonal essay centred on a piece by British textile artist Freddie Robins, called Craft Kills (2002) – a life-size self-portrait, knitted out of grey wool.
… Needle, Laura Grace SimpkinsMultidisciplinary artist Ceyda Oskay draws on textiles and clothing to explore notions of place and human relationships. Keying into traditions of ritual costume and performance, her wearable art work often explores the way garments mediate between us and the world, playing a central role in the rituals and embodied practices central to the human experience.
… Healing Garments, Ceyda Oskay
Anne von Freyburg recycles wearable materials to refashion 17th century Dutch paintings. Her mantra is “I paint with materials” and she deftly manipulates fabrics into images by embroidering onto canvas. Celebrating embellishment as a tool of self-expression, these ‘paintings’ use the visual cues of fashion to suggest art is more than just a decorative object.
So much of the labour and processes that come together to create a piece of artwork can often go unseen. The invisible lengths of time, practice and patience hover on the edges of a piece, as much a part of it as the what is being presented as centre stage.
… Editorial #12: Backstage CraftNwando Ebizie is an artist, composer, writer, DJ, curator, dancer, ritual creator, Afrofuturist and musician. Working across media and genres, Ebizie’s artforms explore the neuroscience of perception, mythopoesis, alternate possibilities and sensations using experimental performance, ritual and sound.
… Staging an Afterglow: Interview with Nwando EbizieJeeYoung Lee is a South Korean visual artist who blends magic, fantasy and reality. Her surreal set designs open up biographical glimpses into the artist’s interior life, creating a series of extraordinary dreamscapes that also function as self-portraits.
… Spotlight On: JeeYoung Lee’s surreal setsWhat if backstage is everything? If the rehearsal is the performance? If there is no moment of completion – how would art look then?
… Practice-Based: On Completion, Process and PlanningWe spotlight Es Devlin’s stage-level labyrinths, which offer poetic interpretations of pop star shows…
… Spotlight on: Es Devlin’s immersive stageMaria Seda-Reeder examines the concept of public inscription and its diverse manifestations…
… The Writing on the Wall: Graffiti as a form of societal resistanceDecorating Dissidence’s Jade French and Suzanna Petot talk textiles and The Women’s Art Collection
with curator Naomi Polonsky…
We re-spotlight an article on the Gee’s Bend quilts, whose work is featured in What Lies Beneath – Women, Politics, Textiles...
… Family, Community, and Inheritance in the Quilt-Making of Gee’s BendWe take a look back at our interview with Enam Gbewonyo, whose work features in What Lies Beneath – Women, Politics, Textiles.
… Decorating Dissidence Podcast – Episode 1: Enam Gbewonyo