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Weaving Futures: Week 4 | Gainsborough

10 December 2016 Company Profile / Events / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Workshops
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gainsborough-2Weaving 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.

Each week, visitors will be able to 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  4 features: Gainsborough

Gainsborough is a Jacquard weaving mill and dye house based in Suffolk, producing the highest quality of cloth from both modern and traditional punch card looms. Established in 1903 by an enterprising weaver, Reginald Warner, the business moved to its present location in 1924.Offering a truly bespoke design service, Gainsborough runs an in-house operation from design and dying through to weaving.  With a wonderful archive of over 7,000 designs built up through Warner’s Grand Tours and successive generations of weaving, Gainsborough is by nature a very special and unfortunately rare example of British craftsmanship and artisanal manufacture.

Awarded the Royal Warrant in 1981, the company has produced fabrics for royal palaces, state buildings and grand residences the world over, and the tradition of creating fabrics of enduring quality carries on today. Gainsborough’s reputation was built on innovation and design, and you are as likely to find our products in a luxury vehicle or on a Parisian catwalk as on the walls of a stately home. Their designs span the full breadth of creative expression, from the very traditional to the thoroughly avant-garde.gainsborough-1 Continue reading →

Weaving Futures: Week 3 | Camira

8 December 2016 Events / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Workshops
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camira-transport-loom-2mbWeaving 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.

Each week, visitors will be able to 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 3 features: Camira
Residency dates: 9th & 10th Dec 2016. 18th Jan & 7th Feb 2017
Activity days: 9th & 10th Dec 2016, 7th Feb 2017

Camira is an independent UK based company which designs and manufactures contract performance fabrics for transport and commercial interiors. They are the major sponsors of  the Weaving Futures exhibition

The company was founded in 1974 as Camborne Fabrics in Huddersfield, which spent 9 years as part of the US Interface organisation before completing a successful management buy-out 10 years ago. They got involved in transport fabrics through a couple of acquisitions, firstly British Furtex Fabrics in 2003, then John Holdsworth & Co in 2007. The relations between the Holdsworth brand and TfL go back decades, as Holdsworth was originally founded in 1822 and got involved in moquette rail fabrics at a very early stage.

camira-transport-2mbCamira is described as a young company with a very rich heritage. They have over 500,000 sq. feet of UK manufacturing, 75,000 sq. feet in Lithuania, and control the bulk of their supply chain and manufacturing processes, from yarn dyeing, through warping, weaving and textile finishing.

They have in-house design, colour and technical specialists, who can exploit their diverse weaving capabilities to create different fabric constructions and design styles.

Camira make 8 million metres of fabric a year, including a million metres for transport applications, and sell to 70 countries around the world. They hold the Queen’s Awards for International Trade and Sustainable Development.

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 : aka 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.

The weavers for the season are Rosie Green & Hanna Vinlöf Nylen

Text and images : With thanks to Camira

 

Weaving Futures: Week 3 | Assemble

2 December 2016 Events / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Workshops
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assemble2Weaving 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.

Each week, visitors will be able to 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 3 features: Assemble
Residency dates: 4th – 8th Dec 2016
Activity days: 6th & 8th Dec 2016

Assemble are a collective based in London who work across the fields of art, architecture and design. They began working together in 2010 and are comprised of 20 members. Assemble champion a working practice that is interdependent and collaborative, seeking to actively involve the public as both participant and collaborator in the on-going realisation of the work.

In 2015 Assemble won The Turner Prize for their project Granby Workshop that makes experimental, handmade products for homes. It was set up as part of the community-led rebuilding of a Liverpool neighbourhood, following years of dereliction and institutional neglect.

Image copyright Assemble info@assemblestudio.co.ukMaria Lisogorskaya, Jane Hall and Paloma Strelitz from Assemble will be the residents in Weaving Futures. Continue reading →

Weaving Futures: Week 1 – Wallace Sewell

22 November 2016 Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Workshops
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wallace-sewell-overground-moq-swatchWeaving 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.

Each week, visitors will be able to see invited designers/artists in residence in the Designology studio, who will be working on a project brief and interacting with a weaver. 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. 

The first residents in the ‘Weaving Futures’ Studio are Wallace Sewell

Residency dates: 21st – 26th Nov 2016
Activity days: 22nd & 26th Nov 2016

The Designology, Weaving Futures Studio is open at all the times the museum is open. Vistors very welcome

Weaving Future exhibition dates: 22 November 2016 to 18 February 2017

About Wallace Sewell
UK based British design studio, Wallace Sewell, was established by Harriet Wallace-Jones and Emma Sewell after graduating from The Royal College of Art in 1990. Their diverse portfolio includes scarves for the Tate museums as well as moquette fabric designs for Transport for London’s underground seating.

When exhibiting for the first time in 1992, their pieces created much enthusiasm and interest, particularly from Barney’s, New York who placed an order for scarves. This proved instrumental in kick starting the Wallace Sewell brand. Barneys are still buying today and Wallace Sewell now supply over 200 stockists in 20 countries.

They have worked with various boutique hotels, designing and producing bespoke bedspreads and more recently have been invited to be guest designers for an international retail brand. Working from their studio in London and their Dorset outpost, this progressive design duo pioneers excellence and originality within their woven products.

Combining innovation with practical solutions, Wallace Sewell is known for their use of colour, structure and yarn in surprising geometric formats. Inspired by paintings, they create individual contemporary fabrics with strikingly bold, asymmetric blocks and stripes of varying scales, which bring together a plethora of elements within one piece.
Continue reading →

Chromaticity: Ptolemy Mann

17 November 2016 General / New weave developments / News
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stanhope-commission-chromaticity-detail-hand-dyed-and-woven-textile-artworks‘Chromaticity’
A New Art Commission for Stanhope

Ptolemy Mann has made  a series of large hand dyed and woven artworks for Stanhope.

The  series of eight 2.5m high artworks illustrate her love of Chromatic Minimalism  to its greatest extent.

Chromaticity means ‘an objective specification of the quality of a colour and consists of two independent parameters, often specified as hue and saturation.’ As seen in the colours found at the nearby Stanhope developmen,t Central Saint Giles by Renzo Piano, the artworks reveal extreme colour saturation unique to hand dyeing and weaving and tell an abstract, intuitive, visual story. This series is also a play on words…a colourful city is a glorious city and London has become a place for colourful buildings to grow in unexpected and unexplored places.

The warp and weft of the cloth becomes a macro city, with warp and weft reflecting the vertical and horizontal line of built architecture. This relationship is demonstarted by the following definition of the word architecture:

straight-crop“Architecture: from the Latin, teks – to weave (as a net); also to fabricate, a root shared with text, textile, context, subtle and technology. More especially to build a dwelling with tools…”

Ptolemy  love is creating artworks and she finds, after over 20 years of weaving, that it surprises and delights her deeply. The process and method of weaving becomes increasingly more symbolic of all creative endeavors she undertakes.

dsc_5065To celebrate this fact Stanhope commissioned the photographer Darek Fortas to photograph the dyeing and weaving process during the making of this work. Mysterious and complex these images reveal part of that process. She extends great thanks to the art consultants Dickson Russell for initiating and managing the commission and to the team at Stanhope for being such exceptional clients.

If anyone is interested in buying or commissioning artworks  email: info@ptolemymann.com for a current list of available artworks.

Top photograph by: Justin Piperger

Tapestry workshops: Caron Penney

17 November 2016 Courses / General / News / Workshops
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img_4089Tapestry Workshops, Mill Studio, Near Arundel, West Sussex.

Dates: 31st Jan – 14th March,  every Tuesday

Caron Penney will lead a series of  one day Tapestry Workshops investigating, colour theory, overlays, blending and hatching, all skills required to make contemporary tapestry.

Working on pre-warped frames, the workshops will also investigate basic warp and weft structures
and settings. By the end of each class students will have completed a small woven tapestry. It is
preferred that students have a beginners knowledge of weaving or tapestry weaving.

The workshops begin on the 31 January and run until 14 March. There are additional Tapestry
Critique half days if at the end of the 6 weeks students would like to discuss their work with a view
to further development, these are on the 28 March and 4 April. These take place in a friendly,
encouraging environment.

About the Tutor:
Caron Penney is a Master Tapestry Weaver who has worked with artists as varied as Tracey Emin,
Gillian Ayres, and Martin Creed. She studied at Middlesex University to achieve her BA (Hons)
Degree in Constructed Textiles in 1993 and studied for her PGCE in 2001 at Portsmouth
University.
Continue reading →

Exhibition: ‘Weaving Futures’ | London Transport Museum

31 October 2016 Events / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Workshops
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wallace-sewell-tram-moq-swatchDates: 22 November 2016 to 18 February 2017

‘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.

Each week, visitors will be able to see invited designers/artists in residence in the Designology studio, who will be working on a project brief and interacting with a weaver. 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.

51977-049‘Weaving Futures’ is  curated by design & research industry experts, Philippa Brock and Samuel Plant Dempsey

The Weaving Futures season will start with Wallace Sewell, who will be in residence in the studio from Nov 22nd – 26th 2016

Other residents participating in the season  include: Assemble, Beatwoven, Philippa Brock, Camira, Central Saint Martins, BA Textile students, Samuel Dempsey, Linda Florence, Gainsborough Weaving Company, Eleanor Pritchard, Rare Thread : aka 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.

The weavers for the season are Rosie Green & Hanna Vinlöf Nylen

Continue reading →

Jacquard Ribbon Loom Restoration: Emma Wood | Part 2

28 October 2016 Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News
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image-1Jacquard Restoration in Berlin: Emma Wood Update

Work has been continuing steadily with the restoration of a 1920s ribbon Jacquard at the Deutsches Techniksmuseum in Berlin by Emma Wood & Birgit Zehlike.

Following the initial assessment and cleaning of the loom, the latest task has been to mend or replace the eight warps that are currently threaded on. The first five of these warps are connected to the first Jacquard mechanism, and the last three are connected to the second Jacquard mechanism.

Unfortunately there is no available threading plan, so the only keys to figuring out the threading of each of the eight warps were the old examples of woven ribbon and the original punchcards. This meant Emma had to look at the damaged threading that currently existed on the loom, compare this to the ribbon samples, and then reconstruct what the warp order and threading should be ( image above).

All of the eight ribbon warps use both the extra-warp and extra-weft techniques, and she was able to break each ribbon into a number of different design blocks. Once the design was broken down this way, it was much easier to calculate the correct threading plan.

image-2

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Exhibition: Nature in the Making

27 October 2016 Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News
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a3postersleedoornwevers

Nature in the Making is a joint exhibition taking place in Galerie de Sleedoorn, Hendrik Piersonstraat, 11b, 6671 CK, Zetten, Netherlands.

Dates: 4 – 27 November 2016

Weavers Stacey Harvey-Brown and Agnes Hauptli weave artworks based around geology and roadtrips in the US and New Zealand. Both are drawn to the same inspiration – rocks, erosion, lichen, canyons, caverns, and gorges – but they have very different means of expression.

Hauptli’s work is steeped in colour – intense hues, dramatic colourplay, visual movement and delivered through both pictorial (jacquard) and organic lines in shaft weaving.

Harvey-Brown focuses on texture – surface texture and three-dimensional through the use of structural weaving techniques and different qualities of shrinkage.

The two different styles lead to an interesting exhibition, each time bringing in new work and intriguing audiences. This is its second appearance in Europe, having been shown in Switzerland, and previously in two venues in New Zealand and two in the US.

Both artists will be present at the gallery, and Harvey-Brown will be demonstrating the weaving process throughout the exhibition.
Continue reading →

Conference: Textile Futures | Technology, Materials and Preservation

23 October 2016 Conferences / Events / General / News
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mycelium%20rubber%206-1The Textile Society Conference

Textile Futures: Technology, Materials and Preservation

Date: Saturday 5th November, Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road, London.

This conference will examine recent advances in textile design, materials and technology, considering emerging ideas and approaches that may change the way we design, make, use and preserve textiles in the future.

The conference begins at 11.15am and finishes at 5.15pm. Lunch and refreshments are included.

The keynote speaker is Janis Jefferies, Professor of Visual Arts and Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. Janis will be speaking on her research that examines the relationship between culture and technology, including wearable devices as ‘intelligent textiles’.

Dr Kate Lloyd from the industry organisation ‘Textile Intelligence’, will be speaking on thermochromics and advances in textile print technology, and Dr Celina Jones from the University of Manchester, will be discussing her research on textile printing and sustainability, looking at low impact techniques, reducing the use of colorants, and new ways of distressing denim.

They will also be joined by Anne French, Textile Conservator and Collections Care Manager at the Whitworth Art Gallery, speaking on the challenges of conserving increasingly complex textile materials for the future, and Professor Carole Collet from Central Saint Martins, speaking about her work with the design & living systems lab, biotextiles and the advantages of biological tools for a more sustainable textile future.

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