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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

Bernat Klein: Design in Colour | Exhibition & Book

4 November 2022 Exhibitions / General / News / Publication / Weave Designer Profile
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A new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland will explore the life and career of one of the 20th century’s leading forces in Modernist design, in the centenary year of his birth. Bernat Klein: Design in Colour celebrates the work of the Serbian-born textile designer Bernat Klein (1922 – 2014) who settled in the Scottish Borders after the Second World War.

Opening dates: 5 November 2022 to 23 April 2023
Admission: Free

The exhibition will examine his creative process and varied career; from supplying innovative couture fabrics to some of Europe’s top fashion houses to his strong influence on architecture and interior design in the UK and Scandinavia.

Opening on 5 November, it marks the centenary of Klein’s birth and is part of a series of cultural events developed by the Bernat Klein Foundation to celebrate the designer in 2022. It will chart his 60-year career as a textile designer, artist, educator, and colour consultant.

National Museums Scotland acquired his archive in 2010. This internationally significant collection of around 4,000 objects ranges from fabrics and garments to design development material.

On display in the exhibition will be highlights from the collection – including couture fashion, interior designs, textiles and original artworks – alongside newly acquired pieces which contextualise Klein’s work and recognise his legacy. Made possible with Art Fund support through the New Collecting Awards, these acquisitions include creations by fellow textile designers Ascher Ltd and Tibor Reich.

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Publication: Textile Design Theory in the Making | Elaine Igoe

1 December 2021 General / Publication
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Textile Design Theory in The Making
Textile design inhabits a liminal space spanning art, design and craft. This book explores how textile design bridges the decorative and the functional, and takes us from handcrafting to industrial manufacture. In doing so, it distinguishes textiles as a distinctive design discipline, against the backdrop of today’s emerging design issues.

With commentaries from a range of international design scholars, the book demonstrates how design theory is now being employed in diverse scenarios to encourage innovation beyond the field of design itself. Positioning textiles within contemporary design research, Textile Design Theory in the Making reveals how the theory and practice of textile design exist in a synergistic, creative relationship.

Drawing on qualitative research methods, including auto-ethnography and feminist critique, the book provides a theoretical underpinning for textile designers working in interdisciplinary scenarios, uniting theory and texts from the fields of anthropology, philosophy, literature and material design.

Elaine Igoe is Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Textile Design at the University of Portsmouth, UK

Holly McQuillan: Weaving Multimorphic Textile-Forms

19 June 2021 Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / Publication / Reseach / Weave Designer Profile
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When Holly McQuillan began her PhD almost 5 years ago, she knew very little about the process of weaving or its potential to transform her research practice, which was primarily form-focused in the context of zero waste fashion design and pattern cutting. However, her experience at the Department of Design in the Swedish School of Textiles provided access to exciting technology and skillful colleagues, and combined with her inherent curiosity to lead to a body of research that operates at the boundary between weave thinking and form thinking, helping to grow the emerging field of textile-form (or 3D) weaving.

Holly came to weaving through her experience consulting with industry and researching zero waste design practices and pattern cutting. Like weaving, zero waste garment design is inherently an ancient practice that values textiles first and foremost. In contrast the fashion industry values speed and cost first. As McQuillan discovered during one of her PhD case studies, the industry would rather waste 4km of virgin textiles (on a single style and size for a season!), than add a single seam. In response, Holly’s research began to explore alternative systems of garment and form creation, coming to focus on textile-form weaving, which, like 3D (seamless and fully fashioned) knitting, enables the simultaneous and on-demand creation of textile and form.

The majority of 3D woven garments have been developed by textile designers, so Holly was interested to explore the potential of applying a zero waste form-making lens to the design of weave-able 3D forms. Beginning with simple t-shirt forms (one shown below), the experiments in McQuillan’s PhD, “Zero Waste Systems Thinking: Multimorphic Textile-forms”, progressively build a foundation of the textile-form thinking skills needed to construct these complex topologies.

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Exhibition: Pushing The Limits | A Virtual Shaft Weaving Art Exhibition

12 January 2021 Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Publication
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Pushing the Limits is a virtual shaft weaving artwork exhibition curated by former European Textile Network ETN president -and always a weaver- Lala de Dios (Spain) and textile artist Olivier Masson (France) who has also engineered the exhibition.

Weaving is one of oldest human industries -if not the oldest- and many kinds of looms or weaving devices have been accompanying humankind since the beginning of times. From the backstrap to dobby looms, the history of weaving has been an uninterrupted succession of technological inventions until the arrival of the first Jacquard hand looms in 18th century France.  The rest is history. Today we are living the digital Jacquard loom era. Contemporary textile artists use this tool which allows for an -almost- unlimited freedom to weavers.

This should not hide the fact that many of today’s artists and designers are happily enjoying weaving in shaft looms as weavers have been doing for hundreds of years. Not only to weave the functional textiles so often associated with the machine, but also works of art ; from Anni Albers’ pictorial weavings to Peter Collingwood`s macrogauzes to quote only two well-known examples from the last century.

The exhibition aims to highlight the incredible possibilities of that supposedly limited “machine” to create textile pieces that are works of art in their own right. Continue reading →

Art Quill Studio & Blog | Marie-Therese Wisniowski

4 September 2020 Artist Profile / Company Profile / Events / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Publication / Reseach / Workshops
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Art Quill Studio: A website featuring glossaries & articles relevant to Textile Art

Marie-Therese Wisniowski works as a full time studio artist, researcher, author, curator, university lecturer and is the former co-editor of Textile Fibre Forum art magazine.

She is the Director of Art Quill Studio & Blog. Her first post on the Art Quill Studio blogspot was published on August 26, 2010 focussing on the first ArtCloth exhibition in Australia featuring international and national textile artists and was titled – ArtCloth: Engaging New Visions and featured important textile artists such as Norma Starszakowna (UK), Joan Schulze (USA), Joan Truckenbrod (USA), Cas Holmes (UK), Jane Dunnewold (USA) and Ken Kagajo (Japan) – amongst others. At the present time over 500 posts have been published.

At the outset Art Quill Studio blogspot was designed to educate as well as to entertain. The education posts were titled, Art Resource, under the header of the post. At the time of writing more than one hundred Art Resources have been published. These are mostly published in the first week of every month. In order to access these resources more quickly, in the ‘Preamble’ of every Art Resource post are links to all of the other Art Resource posts on the blogspot. Example:  One Hundreth Art Resource. Continue reading →

Weaving: Contemporary Makers on the Loom | Katie Treggiden

22 October 2018 General / New weave developments / Publication
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There is  an exciting scene of professional designers, artisans and artists that continue to revitalise the centuries-old craft today.

From rugs and wall hangings to artistic installations and subversive interventions, contemporary expressions of the craft are as diverse as they are numerous.

Weaving – Contemporary Makers on the Loom presents a survey of this vibrant revival, with profiles of over twenty contemporary weavers:

Argentinian Alexandra Kehayoglou, designs breath-taking natural landscapes (for the likes of Dries van Noten), while Daniel Harris (UK) makes textiles for famous clothing brands using nineteenth century looms.

Brent Wadden (Canada) weaves beautiful, museum-standard fabrics.

The book includes  images of their studios, work and inspiration and indepth essays on the craft’s relationship with themes such as emancipation, migration and new technologies.

The featured weavers in the book are Alexandra Kehayoglou (Argentina), Allyson Rousseau
(Canada), Brent Wadden (Canada), Christy Matson (US), Daniel Harris (UK), Dee Clements (US), Diedrick Brackens (US), Dienke Dekker (Netherlands), Eleanor Pritchard (UK), Erin M. Riley (US), Genevieve Griffiths (New Zealand), Hermine Van Dijck (Belgium), Hiroko Takeda (Japan), Ilse Acke (Belgium), Jen Keane (UK), Judit Just (Spain), Karin Carlander (Denmark), Kayla Mattes (US), Lauren Chang (US), Rachel Scott (UK), Rachel Snack (US) and Tanya Aguiñiga (Mexico). In the Weaving Futures section are included Jorien Wiltenburg, Philippa Brock (UK)  & Jen Keane (UK), amongst others. Continue reading →

Anni Albers: Tate Modern

15 September 2018 Events / Exhibitions / General / News / Publication
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This autumn Tate Modern will present the UK’s first major retrospective of the work of Anni Albers (1899-1994). This exhibition will bring together her most important works from major collections in the US and Europe, many of which will be shown in the UK for the first time, to highlight Albers’s significance as an artist.

Opening ahead of the centenary of the Bauhaus in 2019, this exhibition is long overdue recognition of Albers’s pivotal contribution to modern art and design, and part of Tate Modern’s wider commitment to showing artists working in textiles.

Anni Albers combined the ancient craft of hand-weaving with the language of modern art, finding within the medium many possibilities for the expression of modern life.

Featuring over 350 objects including beautiful small-scale studies, large wall-hangings, jewellery made from everyday items, and textiles designed for mass production, this exhibition will explore the many aspects of Albers’s practice – such as the intersection between art and craft; hand-weaving and machine production; ancient and modern.

Albers held a long-standing interest in the relationship between textiles and architecture and the show will highlight her lesser-known commissioned works in this area. The exhibition design will take inspiration from the artist’s own writings, such as her seminal essay ‘The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture’, 1957, in which Albers advocates ‘a new understanding between the architect and the inventive weaver’.

Born in Berlin at the turn of the century, Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann became a student at the Bauhaus in 1922, where she met her husband Josef Albers and other key modernist figures like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Though the Bauhaus aspired to equality between the sexes, women were still discouraged from learning certain disciplines including painting. Albers began weaving by default, but it was in textiles that she found her means of expression, dedicating herself to the medium for the majority of her career.

The exhibition will explore how, here in the school’s vibrant weaving workshop, traditional hand-weaving was redefined as modern art. Continue reading →

Collaboration project: Nadia – Anne Ricketts

23 February 2016 Company Profile / Exhibitions / General / New weave developments / News / Publication
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Beatie Wolfe, David Mason aka Mr Fish & BeatWoven by Stuart NichollsSeeing music differently in The House of Rock; 34 Montague Square.

A collaboration between woven textile artist Nadia-Anne Ricketts from BeatWoven, musician Beatie Wolfe and Saville Row tailor David Mason of Mr. Fish.

It all began on the night of a book launch; The Digital Handmade : Craftsmanship in the New Industrial Revolution, where both textile artist Nadia-Anne Ricketts and innovative musician Beatie Wolfe were introduced by the author Lucy Johnston . It was the beginning of a collaboration where the five worlds of fashion, music, craft, history and technology would collide to show how music and craft can be worn and seen very differently in a compelling, storytelling way.

ProcessDubbed ‘The Secret Abbey Road’, 34 Montague Square is the former home of Hendrix, McCartney, Lennon and Ono; and the very birthplace of a ‘Wind Cries Mary’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’.

The basement flat now belongs to savile row tailor, David Mason, an already collaborative partner to Beatie Wolfe. Both were eager to launch both David’s new acquisition; the re-launch of the flamboyant fashion label to the rock stars of the 60’s – Hendrix, Bowie and Jagger to name a few – Mr. Fish; with the release of Beatie’s new album consisted of music lyrics inspired by the very people that inhabited the space fifty years ago.
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Exhibition: Tibor Reich

18 January 2016 Exhibitions / General / Publication
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4) Tibor infront of Clifford Mill (his mill) 1950This year celebrates the centenary of pioneering designer Tibor Reich, who brought modernity into British textiles. A major retrospective at the Whitworth, Manchester opens 29th January – August 2016, accompanied by a publication ‘The Art of Colour and Texture’ available from March 2016.

His revolutionary designs for fabrics, transformed the appearance of both public buildings and domestic interiors in post-war Britain. Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1916, Reich studied architecture and textiles in Vienna before coming to Britain to study textiles at Leeds University. By the time he graduated in 1941 he was designing for London’s top couturiers including Hardy Amies and Edward Molyenux

In 1946 he set up Tibor Ltd, introducing bright new colours, unusual textures and innovative pottery into the drab interiors of post-war Britain. Based in Stratford-upon-Avon, the firm rapidly gained an international reputation, working on prestigious commissions including the 1951 Festival of Britain, the Royal Yacht Britannia (1954) and Concorde (1966).

His fabrics could also be found on post-war furniture including Ercol, Ernest Race and Gordon Russell.

17)Woven Textile Sample Cards 1950s_2

In 2015 Tibor Reich’s Grandson, Sam Reich, began the huge task of reviving his Grandfathers company, Tibor Ltd. The Weave Shed website played a vital role in this, helping Sam to establish contacts within the industry both yarn and manufacturing and in connecting with future employees.

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