Craft Culture
Drawing on personal experience and folkloric myths, Anna Perach uses a traditional craft technique called tufting to create wearable sculptures that come to life during performance in front of a live audience. Anna’s work serves as a mystical antidote to a hyper-rational technocratic reality that has failed humanity systematically since years. Stéphanie Ruth spoke to Anna to find […]
‘C19 Text Talk’ is a hand embroidered diary, comprised of 50 text works, made over a period of 100 days since the enforcement of the UK lockdown on the 23rd March 2020. Each work was made in direct response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, a combination of government guidelines, media quotations and my personal responses to the […]
Find out more about Black Girl Knit Club… Started in January 2019 in East London by friends Sicgmone Kludje & Vea Koranteng, the Black Girl Knit Club was set up to empower black women through craft and to answer the call for more diversity in the craft community. MISSION STATMENT: Our aim is to create […]
Veiled Voices 2020 is an inclusive community embroidery project, which invites women across the UK to come together and explore perceptions of Hijab wearing in Britain, with the aim of creating understanding and friendship. Together we are creating a collaborative embroidery which will become a visual representation of the thoughts, beliefs and questions of the […]
For readers unfamiliar with your work, could you give us a brief overview of why Stitches in Time was first set up and what it aims to achieve? Stitches in Time began as an experiment to see if sewing could start conversations between strangers. This small experiment in 1993 turned into our giant founding project, the […]
Tussar, Chanderi, Kanjeevaram, Bandini, Patola – these are names I would often hear around me while growing up in India, and I remember vividly the accompanied excitement that these words would conjure, and the all-consuming beauty and vibrancy that would follow. Through my early childhood and well into my developmental years, my aesthetic sensibilities were […]
When one imagines a needlewoman from the early twentieth century, one is likely to envisage a pale and subservient figure, skirts sweeping the floor as she sits beside the fire, needle in hand, forging upon her lap another testament of her love for the husband she awaits so patiently. One will not see a smashed […]
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) is one of the most famous pieces of political art. Created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country town in Picasso’s native Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the work combines the artist’s Cubist style with the traditions of political and religious banners. Guernica drew international attention […]
Continuing Decorating Dissidence’s exploration into the legacy of the Bauhaus weaving workshops, Suzanna Petot got in touch with Erica Warren, Associate Curator in the Department of Textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago, to ask a few questions about her career and her most recent exhibition.
Xenobia Bailey’s career is as eclectic and colourful as the spiral crochet patterns that form a key part of her aesthetic. Having studied ethnomusicology at the University of Washington and Industrial Design at the Pratt Institute, she went on to work as a costume designer for Black Arts West and learnt to crochet at the […]
Art and Ethnography Jane’s approach to the production of art that refers to ancient or other cultures comes from an intention to firstly understand something of those cultures and this she does through reading. Sourcing books and information in various outlets including the internet, those books in turn referencing further reading, thus she gathers information […]
Hull-based artist Ella Dorton’s fabric portraits creatively capture the unique spirit of the city’s residents, giving a voice to those who have been left behind by society and, indeed, by City of Culture year.
