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Research: Mono-Material Library x Schoenkwarteir | Sophia Fenlon + Stephanie Rolph

6 October 2024 Awards / Company Profile / Events / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Reseach / Weave Designer Profile
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Mono-Material Library: Designers Sophia Fenlon + Stephanie Rolph

What is the Mono-Material Library?
The Mono-material Library aims to showcase how mono-material design, created with a single fibre such as wool, can achieve diverse textures, forms, and functions through engineered use of woven structures.

This innovative approach shifts focus from selecting fibres based on their inherent properties, to engineering, through woven structure, functionality and transforming a fabrics mechanical properties.

As an emergent area of design, mono-material designing responds directly to the climate emergency by prioritising material or product recyclability or biodegradability at the end of life. This project has evolved from the Designers shared interest in the role textiles can play in achieving Net Zero.

Mono-Material Library x Schoenenkwartier
This collaboration challenged conventional approaches to woven design and shoemaking through an interdisciplinary partnership. This process driven project explores how jacquard and dobby weaving can be used to create mono-material footwear uppers. Focusing on the ability to engineer multi-layer woven textiles on- loom and then transform them through finishing techniques to create functional footwear components. Through an in depth exploration of woven structure, the project investigates how to strategically engineer areas of flexibility, rigidity, stretch and cushioning where required within the uppers.

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Exhibition: Marie Hazard & Masaomi Yasunaga

30 May 2024 Artist Profile / Events / Exhibitions / General / Lecture / New weave developments / News
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Tristan Hoare is delighted to present a dual exhibition of works by French weaver Marie Hazard and ceramics by Japanese artist Masaomi Yasunaga, curated by Sonya Tamaddon. Both threading and ceramics embody notions of being enmeshed, finding connections, coming apart, thus disclosing multiple incarnations, formats, densities, and textures. In the woven works of Hazard and in the ceramic vessels of Yasunaga, the artists make a poignancy of the familiar by allowing rituals of life and their affiliated embellishments to be misconstrued. Both artists engage in radical acts to bring their artworks to life, stripping their chosen mediums of their centuries-long ties to function.

Hazard and Yasunaga embody the spirit of termite artists, a term coined by Manny Farber in 1962 to articulate an artist’s lack of ambition towards gilt culture but rather a squandering, beaverish endeavour in their approach to art-making. While pottery is typically formed by clay, fired in a kiln and sealed with a finishing coat of glaze, Yasunaga employs glaze as his primary material from which he builds his sculptural works, enlisting fire as his sculpting tool. Each fragile glazed construction is prepared for firing by an act of burial under protective layers of sand and kaolin which organically fuse together in the kiln. After ceding a measure of control to fortuity in the firing stage, Yasunaga unearths the object, enacting a ritual performance of interment, transformation, exhumation. This process is influenced by the Japanese doll making method of Hariko, a papier-mâché technique introduced to Japan between the 8th and 12th centuries.

In the spring of 2020 Yasunaga introduced found stones and mosaic tiles into this practice. Deepening both the notion of the termite process to the work and an element of chance, Yasunaga began deploying tiles to the surface of his works prior to firing them. Yasunaga recalls, “this discomfort indicated the possibility that my own boundaries of beauty existed around the periphery.” In his practice, objects once functional with human activities are reconsidered in a state of material death and it is through this process the artist’s pursuit of beauty lies. With these innovations in non-functional, expressive ceramics, Yasunaga extends the influence of this process into the 21st century towards a significant collective reconsideration of what ceramic sculpture has been throughout its history and what it can become.

This notion of time and materiality also lies central to Hazard’s practice. Hazard’s medium of choice is weaving, drawing upon studies of pastel on paper, photography, painting, printmaking, and literature as research materials to inform her works conceived on the loom. Etymologically the word “text” is derived from the Latin word “texere” meaning woven. Pre-Columbian textiles were made for communication prior to the adaptation of written language. If one looks closely they may find a phrase by Rimbaud delicately disguised into Hazard’s weavings – “on ne part pas” (we are here forever). Continue reading →

Job: The Bristol Weaving Mill Ltd | Head of Product Development. Maternity Cover

24 May 2024 General / Jobs / New weave developments
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Role: Head of Product Development: Maternity Cover

The role is to commence in August 2024 under a fixed-term contract (12-13 months)
PT Role, 24 hours per week, salary dependent on experience

Bristol Weaving Mill (BWM) work across both fashion and interiors, designing, developing, and manufacturing woven products and fabric for a variety of outcomes. End uses include but are not limited to Ready to Wear and Couture Menswear and Womenswear fabrics, finished shawls and scarfs, interior drapery, tapestry panels, upholstery fabric and finished interior soft accessories and products such as throws, blankets and cushions.

From their largest commercial client to the smallest personal project, each of their client relationships are based on offering a service catered to their individual needs.
BWM are looking for a driven and passionate leader with previous experience to head up their small Product Development team.

The successful applicant will need to be an excellent communicator and extremely organised with impeccable attention to detail and quality. The ability to self-motivate and
work independently as well as in a team is essential. A real passion for hand-weaving and woven design is essential for this opportunity to contribute to a small and dynamic creative business.

Responsibilities
Project Management:
 Leading the Product Development team, setting and delivering monthly targets for client projects.
 Together with the Production Manger to lead the organisation and monitoring of critical paths in line with company targets.
 Together with the Production Manger to ensure work being completed by BWM sub-contractors runs smoothly.
 Researching and implementing new supplier relationships when necessary.
 Overseeing the division of responsibilities among the BWM Team and flagging up daily and weekly priorities.
 Working closely with the team to make sure that any targets are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time specific.
 Upholding the systems and procedures to ensure efficient and consistent productivity standards in the mill, including project management schedules and project documents.
 Effectively communicating any changes to project critical paths to clients.
 Weekly planning meetings including reporting to company Directors.

Product Development:
 Oversee the Product Development team to ensure the workload is prioritised and distributed, and that projects are running smoothly and on-time.
 Managing key client accounts for existing clients and developing new ones.
 Align any personal design style with the BWM house style and successfully assume and amplify individual client aesthetics through design work.
 Working closely with clients to develop their design ideas through meetings, trend research, mood- boards, CADs and handloom samples.
 Hand-weave design samples for clients and directing other members of the BWM team to weave clientsamples.
Design CADs for clients and projects using Pointcarre weave software and Photoshop, including simulations of products and fabric, and developing original peg-plans and weave structures for client sampling.
 Preparing designs for production thorough and organised digital documentation of design
developments, including product spec sheets, weave tickets, photographic records, and digitised mood-boards.
 Liaising with Production team to ensure projects are handed over accurately and in a timely manner.
 Always designing for the target market, ensuring fabrics and products are costed accurately and in-line with client price-point. Working with suppliers and in-house systems to provide detailed and accurate costings for clients as part of the design development process.
Client Communication:
 Handling customer inquiries for the mill, maintaining communications with existing and new clients remotely by phone, video chat and email.
 Initiating digital meetings and telephone calls with clients and meeting with existing and new clients in-house and at customer premises (mostly UK based only).
 Updating clients on project progress throughout.
 Manage client accounts, including issuing Quotes, Order Confirmations and Invoicing.

Training is provided for operation of in-house handlooms and CAD software (Pointcarre), but a thorough understanding of hand-weaving and woven construction, and previous experience with weaving software is essential for the role.

To apply please email your CV together with a covering letter and your digitalised portfolio, all in
PDF format to juliet@bristolweavingmill.co.uk by 6pm on Friday 31 st May 2024.

Publication | Woven Optical Illusions : Pattern and Designs from Four to 24 Shafts

18 May 2024 General / New weave developments / Publication / Reseach
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Woven Optical Illusions: Patten and Design from Four to 24 Shafts is authored by Stacey Harvey-Brown and Katharina Kronig. Published by The Crowood Press Ltd. ISBN no: 0719843391

Optical illusions are very much part of our time but have been around for hundreds of years. They never cease to fascinate.

Woven Optical Illusions is a newly published book which explores how these effects can translate into woven cloth, the scientific background behind illusory effects and how they can inspire the handloom weaver to develop their creativity.

There are five different chapters, each looking into one particular group of effects and taking the reader from an image to the finished sample. Examples are given to show how to develop the initial inspiration further along with analysis of the visual processes and how to observe them to create the illusion in weaving.

From four shafts through to 24 shafts, the book offers possibilities for weavers at any level of expertise. Particular attention is paid to weavers with eight-shaft looms. The principles behind the development of each sample are explained and all samples are accompanied by explanatory drafts. Plain weave, a large array of tied weaves, colour-and-weave structures, doubleweave and its variations are all used and explained throughout the chapters. A final chapter with technical weaving notes explains these weave structures in more detail.

Within the publication there is a gallery with complex weavings by experienced weavers, mostly with multi-shaft looms, shows the unlimited potential for woven optical illusions.

With many thanks to Stacey Harvey-Brown & Katerina Kronig for the text and image

Exhibition: Woven/Unwoven | Laura Thomas

9 October 2023 Artist Profile / Events / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / Weave Designer Profile / Workshops
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Woven / Unwoven is a major new exhibition of artworks by Laura Thomas at Ruthin Craft Centre, open from the 30th September – 7th January 2024.

The exhibition represents a distillation of all of Laura’s areas of interest in working with thread, making both woven and unwoven works. The transformation of passive threads, held taut on a loom to be woven into a fabric or placed into position to be encapsulated in glass or resin has kept her transfixed for over two decades and is at the very root of this collection of works.

Laura uses threads as lines to evoke what captures her attention in the world around her whether that be coastal horizons; the edge of a hillscape where land meets sky; a full moon; or the minutiae within coastal strata’s and sand patterns that have captivated her since childhood.

Untypical weave structures have always been a hallmark of Laura’s practice, and are indeed fundamental to this new body of work. Many of the textiles are open Spanish Lace constructions, or sparse leno weaves, with selectively cut weft floats allowing for views through the surface at what lies beyond. Rya knots and cut corduroy’s create inviting surfaces evoking coastal grasses and furrowed fields.

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Anita Sarkezi | Weave Designer & Award Winner

24 July 2023 Artist Profile / Awards / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Weave Designer Profile
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Winner of the Weavers’ Company Award at New Designers

Anita Sarkezi was born to working-class Slovenian migrant parents in Sweden and returned to Slovenia during her school years. She has since then lived in several European countries, moving to Scotland in 2018.

Sarkezi’s textile design practice is motivated and informed by her Slavic cultural background. Her work is grounded in the interwoven histories of rural material culture and post-colonialism in Central and Eastern Europe, where she questions the traditional use of floral patterns as national symbols.

Her practice explores the relationship between organic and geometric shapes. Using the TC2 digital loom, Sarkezi constructs an imaginary space consisting of personal ornaments and motifs, as well as bold and gradient uses of colour. This serves as a visual metaphor for the flux of movement and migration and an outlet for her personal narrative as a migrant.

Sarkezi gathers visual information through wandering, catching and recording glimpses of nature in urban centres, then incorporating them into a new reality utilising digital and analogue ways of working.

Sarkezi’s approaches to drawing, colour and design exploration are intuitive and chaotic yet neatly edited at the end of the process. They’re all intertwined throughout the creative journey, and she feels colour exploration can end up in a drawing and design exploration can become a drawing. Form does not exist without colour. Each drawing, colour and design exploration has been collaged from diverse sources, aiming to create something that is ‘original’ and is an expression of her own identity and heritage.

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Weave Designer Profile: Fiona J Sperryn

21 June 2023 Artist Profile / Company Profile / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / Reseach / Weave Designer Profile / Workshops
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‘Scapes Series’

Fresh from London Craft Week…

‘The Cornish landscape always evokes an emotional response in me. The sun dazzling off the water, the splash of the sea, the salty breeze on my face, the call of the gulls. In ‘Scapes’, I’m responding to these sensations, escaping into my imagination, conjuring a landscape’.

Fiona J Sperryn’s recent body of work has been developed on the TC2 digital jacquard loom from her original mark-making. The creative journey started with dirty charcoal drawing outdoors, using local materials and responding to the essence of landscapes visited and imagined.

This was followed by photography and scanning, a clean digital translation into the coded files recognised by the loom. Bobbins were wound with multiple strands of colour and the pieces were handwoven,  indigo dip-dyed and painted once off the loom.

The largest hanging in the ‘Scapes’ series measures 76 x 170cm and the smallest pieces 18 x 15cm within 28cm frames made of recycled ‘Polcore’. Continuing Fiona’s  work with colour blending on the loom in this series, strands of yarn of varying thicknesses are used together with subtle grading of tone and colour as each piece progresses.

The artworks are handwoven using mainly industrial ‘deadstock’ yarns, which include tencel, linen, bamboo, rayon, silk and cotton. It is important to Fiona to limit purchase of new yarn and the creation of waste.

The series was recently exhibited as part of London Craft Week with Future Icons Selects at the Oxo Tower Bargehouse alongside 70 artists and makers, including a number of tapestry and hand weavers.

Fiona hand weaves her artwork in a rural studio in Cornwall and is an active member of Design-Nation. She produces woven pieces to commission for artists and designers.

Fiona additionally offers expert tuition in digital jacquard weaving on the TC2 loom in her studio and is a lecturer at Falmouth University.

Contact: Fiona J Sperryn
IG: @fionajsperryn
FB: Fiona J Sperryn Art

With thanks to Fiona for the text and images

Exhibition: The Tangible Project for London Craft Week 2023

2 May 2023 Artist Profile / Company Profile / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Weave Designer Profile
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The Tangible Project

Venue: gallery@oxo Oxo Tower Wharf, Barge House St, London SE1 9PH
Dates: 10-14 May 2023
Instagram: @the_tangible_project

Three textile artists Amelie Crépy, Jacqueline James and Line Nilsen are creating The Tangible Project with five other very different artists and makers for London Craft Week, 10-14 May 2023.

This exhibition of over 30 new pieces of fine works celebrates the importance of touch through materials and promotes the inherent value of the handmade in art and design. In a world leaning toward digital encounters where so recently society was restricted from physical contact, touch has never mattered more. Hands exploring materials are the lifeblood of artists, a fluid relationship that ignites expression, understanding and a sense of connection.

Amélie Crépy endeavours to use only the purest of materials and as little as possible, often using just one colour. She seeks to replicate synthetic processes and digital techniques with hand-made pigments, inks, dyes and other mediums. Her love for the physicality of woven fabric, combined with her history as a textile print designer, has inspired the development of her current practice and the layered patterns she produces. For The Tangible Project she is focusing specifically on hand made oak gall ink created from crushed up galls found on oak trees which will be transferred onto pure Linen. Her work will be presented as both traditional framed artworks, as well as a large-scale piece hung from the wall. Instagram: @ameliecrepy

Jacqueline James’ current collection for The Tangible Project has been positively influenced by working with artist and textile designer Amélie Crépy during their collaboration to create ‘The Alchemy of Blue’ for Collect Open 2022. She will be combining natural, luxury yarns, including wool, linen, silk and banana fibre, to accomplish interesting surface texture with a sensory tactile quality.

Her latest work will feature custom dyed and handwoven textiles for both the floor and the wall. Several new designs are motivated by her fascination with sacred geometry. Jacqueline is further exploring the use of natural dyes and is excited to share her new colour palette. Instagram @Jacqueline_james_rugs

Line Nilsen who will be showing a range of handwoven artworks – contemporary crafted paintings with strong ties to traditional textile making. Continuing on from past work, she is exploring hand cut floats and textured surfaces in her recent body of work. Building on ikat dye techniques, Line has developed her own way of achieving a softer brush stroke effect in her work. Her pieces are hand dyed and painted in multiple stages to get the desired look. All her weaves are made on a 16-shaft mechanical dobby loom. Line is using her love of craft and materials to connect the viewer to her native Norway.

Instagram: @linenilsentextiles

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Exhibition: The Jacquard Project | Hannah Robson

6 March 2023 Artist Profile / Awards / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News
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In March 2023, Sunny Bank Mills will present a unique project of collaborative work led by weaver and artist Hannah Robson. Hannah has created a series of dynamic woven textiles using an industrial jacquard loom at Bradford College.

These striking fabrics have been developed in partnership with four local artists: a sculptor, a jeweller, a weaver and a mixed-media artist.

Hannah describes her motivation for the project:
‘I wanted to work with other artists to open up the process of weaving, which can be very technical and hard to access outside of an industrial setting. Weaving is a magical process that offers infinite possibilities in terms of design, colour and surface. It has been stimulating for me to see how each collaboration has unfolded and the results are distinct and surprising.’

In 2021, Hannah began working with an industrial loom that needed some attention at Bradford College. Through The Jacquard Project she has coaxed the machine back to life with the help of local weavers and loom tuners, who generously advised her, replaced parts and serviced the machine.

Some of these conversations have been captured in a fascinating film created by Karanjit Panesar, intercut with footage of the action of the loom as it weaves, revealing the atmosphere of making cloth and sharing skills.
Link to film: https://youtu.be/G-blWyqmiBw

The Jacquard Project celebrates the weaving heritage of West Yorkshire through the process of creative exchange and collaboration. These new textiles have a contemporary and conceptual edge, presented as large panels on wooden frames. The cloths carry evidence of the making process – the experimentation and exploration, colour and scale variations, yarn testing, and the glitches of the loom. Continue reading →

Theo Rooden: Visual Artist

27 October 2022 Artist Profile / Company Profile / General / New weave developments / News / Reseach / Weave Designer Profile
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Visual artist Theo Rooden (The Netherlands, 1969) loves to take advantage of weaving techniques to build his geometric abstract compositions. In many of his works he challenges the flatness of the fabric with optical effects.

With his self-imposed rules he searches for interesting rhythms and patterns. Possibilities and constraints of the loom and yarn are a source of inspiration. Rooden prefers to make series of works to explore in detail the consequences of algorithms and its variants. When translating a design into a woven fabric, the self-imposed rules need to be bent opening a space for unexpected and interesting results. Intuition regarding colours and composition shape final choices.

Being trained as an Industrial Design Engineer, his path led him more and more to being autonomous to create beautiful things, first in graphic design, later as a visual artist. With a lifelong fascination for patterns he started weaving in 2018. As a fast learner he was able to balance his already developed personal style with the principles of weaving. In 2021 he acquired a damask handloom.

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