Weaving Futures: Week 11 | Ismini Samanidou

Weaving Futures is an exhibition at London Transport Museum highlighting the importance of woven textile design to the London Transport system. The exhibition explores the process and making of digital woven textiles, as part of the Museums’, Designology season. Weaving Futures is curated by Philippa Brock and Samuel Plant Dempsey.

Each week, visitors will can see invited designers/artists in residence in the Designology studio, who will be working on a project brief and interacting with a weaver in their residency dates. The weavers will be interpreting the residents work live into digital woven textile prototypes and final works on a state-of-the-art TC2 digital jacquard loom. 

Week 11 features:  Ismini Samanidou
Residency dates: 1^st – 4^th Feb 2017
Activity days 3^rd & 4^th Feb 2017

Athens born and South East of England based artist Ismini Samanidou trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. Her practice touches on the boundaries of craft, art and design with work developed for site specific commissions, industry collaborations and unique pieces for exhibition.  The work is often site specific and explores the way textiles can be articulated within a space. Ismini has travelled and researched textile techniques worldwide and is principally interested in the way weaving exists as an autonomous language crossing cultural and political

Her work has been exhibited internationally with solo shows in the UK and USA. Recent work includes commissioned textile panels for the National Theatre in London, an invited residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, USA and work exhibited at the Espace De L’Art Concret in France and the Hangzhou Textile Triennial in China. Ismini’s textiles are held in private and public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Jerwood Contemporary Makers award for Timeline, a large-scale textile installation. Ismini has lectured internationally including The Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins in London, Textile Kultur Haslach in Austria and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina USA.

Other residents participating in the Weaving Futures season include: Assemble, Beatwoven, Philippa Brock, Camira, Central Saint Martins, BA Textile students, Samuel Dempsey, Linda Florence, Gainsborough Weaving Company, Eleanor Pritchard, Rare Thread :  Kirsty McDougall & Laura Miles, Josephine Ortega, Ismini Samanidou, Studio Houndstooth: Jo Pierce, Takram & Priti Veja

Resident artists and designers have been invited to respond to a project brief; exploring the role of textiles in modern transport now and in the future. They will focus on ‘untapped’ sources of data generated by, or helpful to, the transport system. Their responses will then be interpreted into woven textiles, live for museum visitors.

Creative responses may span from future speculations on data capture and its textile use, to new methods of digitising human interactions, to creative interpretations and visualisations of existing TfL data sets.

Weaving Futures is jointly Curated by Philippa Brock and Samuel Plant Dempsey. The weavers for the season are Rosie Green & Hanna Vinlöf Nylen.

Images and Text: with thanks to Ismini Samanidou