Art and Design Commons^™

Of Gods And Gangs: Indigo As A New Educational Model, Jenny Balfour Paul

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In late August 2009, a multi-year educational initiative called Silk Road Connect was launched in five pilot schools in underserved neighbourhoods of New York City as part of its Department of Education’s Campaign for Middle School Success. The brainchild of cellist Yo Yo Ma and his Silk Road Project, Silk Road Connect ‘inspires passion-driven learning by empowering students and educators to seek connections across all areas of study and to follow their interests from the familiar to the foreign. In a spirit of playfulness and investigation, collaboration and creativity, this program invites students to experience learning as a continual process …

Choreographed Cartography: Translation, Feminized Labor, And Digital Literacy In Half/Angel’S The Knitting Map, Deborah Barkun, Jools Gilson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Knitting Map was a large-scale, durational textile installation by the Irish-based performance production company half/angel that took place during Cork’s year as European Capital of Culture (2005). Bringing a decade of experience with emergent technologies and art practice, half/angel developed technologies to connect the physical busy-ness of Cork City (captured via a series of CCTV cameras) with correspondingly complex knitting stitches (stitches became more complex when the city was busy), and Cork weather (captured by a weather station) to yarn color. The resulting textile was an abstract documentation of a year in the life of an Irish city, in …

Conversation With Nature, Kyoung Ae Cho

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

I am engaged in a conversation with nature. Each work produced is the result of an intimate dialogue between artist and materials. The conversation may begin as I gather recycled organic matter and collect man-made objects of little value, or it may commence with a sudden discovery: of the beauty in a corn leaf, for example. Leaves and flowers that have fallen to earth are dried, ironed, flattened and stitched: processes that I view as ceremonial transitions from one stage of being to another. Through preparing the materials, I am attentive to the ways they reveal, through shape, pattern, color, …

The Fiber Of Our Lives: A Conceptual Framework For Looking At Textiles’ Meanings, Beverly Gordon

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Based on the model explicated in my forthcoming (Thames & Hudson, Fall 2010) book, The Fiber of Our Lives: Why Textiles Matter, I will present a holistic framework that can be used to articulate and compare the meanings of textiles of any given culture or historic period. The framework considers the range of human activities and concerns, including meeting practical survival needs and securing physical, psychological and psychic protection; social interactions; the propensity to seek and wield power; the communication of ideas and aesthetic expression; and activities geared to transcending the limits of human experience—i.e., the spiritual realm. This approach …

Future Reliquaries, Barbara Heller

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

As a tapestry weaver, spinner, and dyer, I cherish the handmade. But, as a full-fledged member of the electronic age, I realize that the haptic has had a hard time maintaining its status. My Future Reliquary Series is an attempt to reconcile three apparently separate but, in my mind, connected histories: weaving, computing, and religion.

Weaving is a binary system of up/down, just as computing is a binary system of on/off. The first computer was a jacquard loom, complete with punch cards. The process of mechanization removed the human hand from weaving. In an analogous manner, today’s computers have introduced …

The Way Of Sami Duodji: From Nomadic Necessity To Trademarked Lifestyle, Desiree Koslin

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Sami people of Northwestern Eurasia in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia share historical vicissitudes brought upon them with most other First Peoples. Their languages were suppressed, their religion and culture obliterated, and their way of life ultimately condemned to marginality. In a painful process that was first given wider attention in texts of the seventeenth century, the Sami were given few options for survival but to acquiesce and adapt to the dictates issued, largely losing their cultural identity in the process.

Today, thanks to extensive advocacy of Sami activists starting in the 1960s, a reawakened Sami identity is fostered …

Invisible No More: The Embellished Abaya In Qatar, Christina Lindholm

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Shari’a law and local custom dictate that Muslim women in Qatar wear the abaya, an all-encompassing black garment. Supposedly a deterrent to unwanted male attention and a device to protect men from lascivious thoughts, the abaya has rendered women anonymous when in public, silently moving through society as unidentified and all but invisible beings. Increased Western employment, tourism, and media in the forms of magazines, radio, television and the Internet have brought images of Euro-American lifestyles into Arab homes. Higher education for women has resulted in increased female opportunity and independence. Many women travel abroad and every year more complete …

Contemporary Interpretation Of An Unusual Navajo Weaving Technique, Connie Lippert

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

I am not Navajo and, therefore, I do not practice Navajo weaving. I do use the wedge weave technique that was practiced by the Navajo for a period in the late 1800s. A Navajo wedge weave is easily recognizable because of the colors used and the shapes consistent with other Navajo weaving. Although I use the same technique, my use of color and shape transforms wedge weave into a contemporary weave.

Wedge weave is an unusual form of tapestry. Pictorial imagery is not its goal. Instead, the weft is woven in such a way that the actual horizontal-vertical structure of …

Synthetic Fibers, Showy Cars And Sportshirts: Liberating The Fashion Spirit Of “The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit”, Diane Maglio

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

We want to sing the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the earth, along the circle of its orbit. F. T. Marinetti Futurists of 1911 celebrated technology, the beauty of speed and racing cars with “great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath.” They integrated their philosophy with a Manifesto of Men’s Clothing extolling comfort, joyful practicality and illumination –light even in the rain. In the 1950s, American men followed the path of the Futurists driving dream cars with spectacular tail fins and fashionable synthetic jacquard upholstery while dressing in sport shirts of expressive fibers …

Tradition Embraces “The New”: Depictions Of Modernity On Japanese Kurume E-Gasuri Futon-Ji, Ann Marie Moeller

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Kurume is a city on Kyushu Island in Japan known for producing dramatic hand-woven e-gasuri (picture ikat) futon-ji (bedding covers). The most famous have a single picture which runs across four or five panels. Both the warp and weft threads were resist dyed using indigo before being woven into a single long and narrow length of fabric. This cloth was then cut into the panel sections and sewn together. Extraordinary skill was required to both accurately tie the areas of thread to be resisted and to maintain a consistent tension when weaving the fabric. This precision produced complex designs with …

Cutting Through The Surface: The Use Of Laser Cutting Technology With Traditional Textile Process, Jessica Payne

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Laser cutting technology is now widely associated with textiles, but prior to the research of designers such as Janet Stoyel, in the early 1990s, it was regarded as a non textile specific technology. Over the past ten years many contemporary designers have used laser technology in conjunction with textiles; leading to the widely seen ‘cut through’ design aesthetic, as exemplified by the work of product designer, Tord Boontje. The technology, however, has not been vigorously exploited and tested in conjunction with traditional textile processes such as flocking, foiling, and print. This paper discusses and discloses my recent research which investigates …

Tracing Cochineal Through The Collection Of The Metropolitan Museum, Elena Phipps, Nobuko Shibayama

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Cochineal, with its origin in the Americas, by the 16th century was exported throughout the world. From the time of the Spanish encounter with the Americas in the late 15th and early 16th century, a dyestuff for a strong, fast, red color was in high demand. While many archival documents and scholarly writing exist on the use and shipment of cochineal throughout the world, and on its impact on the textile industry, this paper traces the pathway of its use through an examination of artworks in the Metropolitan Museum. Scientific analysis aids the study in the identification of cochineal (and …

Velvetweaving Today: A Worldwide Overview, Barbara Setsu Pickett

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Velvet is a luxury cloth. Fashioned into garments, it dresses the elite. In interiors, it covers walls and upholsters furniture. Its sumptuous display denotes status, power, privilege and wealth. For the past twenty-eight years, my research and art has focused on learning its traditions and handweaving practice.

Besides studying textile archives, I have more importantly visited the few remaining ateliers and have interviewed the artisans to learned about their training, methods and activities.

How do they control the tension of the pile warp?
How do they prevent crushing the woven velvet while it is on the loom?
How do they …

What’S Old Is New Again: Carved Board Clamped Resist Dyeing, Jay Rich, Ana Lisa Hedstrom, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Elin Noble

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This panel of textile artists comes together to discuss current replication studies and design application of an ancient resist dyeing technique that involves carved board clamped resist dyeing on fabric. The inspiration pushing the panelists comes from 6-7th century jia xie in China and kyokechi in Japan and work from the Calico Museum in India as well as the important work of contemporary researchers, Tomoko Torimaru and Masanoa Arai.

The idea of creating patterns by tightly clamping folded fabric between mirrored carved board pairs is simple. The contemporary artistry is in finessing and manipulating dye penetration, choice of contemporary fabrics …

Urban Textiles: From Yarn Bombing To Crochet Ivy Chains, Ruth Scheuing

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Small hand-knitted little cozies appear in my local neighborhood; overgrown weeds in an urban community garden become a source for materials and inspiration.

These new approaches to textiles by emerging artists explore new aesthetics and explode relationships between process and material and ideas about the use for handmade objects. These artists question the use of galleries as exhibition venues, curators, and juries as judges, and commerce/consumerism around finished objects. Instead they use the street as exhibition space and blogs or flickr sites as venues to create local and global communities.

KnitGirl’s work consists of knitted patches attached to telephone poles, …

From Traditional To Digital Tools, Grethe Sorensen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

By the invention of digital thread control and digital subject processing programs, quite new possibilities for creating woven textiles have come into existence.

I will describe my way from the traditional to the digital tools. A development that over the last ten years has lead me to new expressions in woven textiles—elusive optical phenomena, color gradations and a new weave-construction based on digital technology.

It was the absorption in digital subject processing that inspired me to explore the possibilities of developing new methods for creating weave-constructions.

The similarity between pixelated pictures and the graphic expression for a weave-construction gave the …

Traversing Locality/Navigating Borders, Kelly Thompson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

What is it to be located? What are the markers of communication that travel with us, or that we seek locally? Recent art practices that address notions of geography, migration, settlement and travel in an increasingly ‘globalized’ and mediatized world are presented in this paper. With Montreal, Canada as the site of location, this research explores ways in which experience intermingles in the poetics of visual translation of ‘real world’ imagery into textile-based responses. Travel and ‘the local’ suggests a map, a rhizome, consisting of multiple entry points “entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real”, as Deleuze …

Performing The Quilt: The Block To The Blog And Back Again, Sarah E. Tucker

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper will examine the work of three contemporary Australian quiltmakers in terms of a Deleuzian ‘smooth space’. It will be argued that the patchwork quilt represents a material manifestation of a concept which marks out networked, relational and transversal thought and, has the potential to link both the most similar and the most disparate of ideas. A weblog (hhtp://quilted-out-ofspace.blogspot.com) will document the process and in turn be analysed to explore parallels with the processes of making a quilt— including the potential for alternative social networks such as ‘cybermovements’, ‘submerged networks’, and ‘counterpublics’.

The quilts of Emma Rowden, Judy McDermott, …

Zaher Va Baten: Outer Form And Inner Meaning In Iranian Textile Designs, James Turner

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The distinction between zaher and baten, outer and inner, is a fundamental duality encountered in the philosophical, psychological, religious and mystical aspects of Iranian thought. The metaphysical desire to go beyond sensory apprehension of transient external forms to intellectual comprehension of their lasting inner significance may be considered the central theme of Iranian visual art including textile designs. A close examination of four textiles from the modern period reveals some of the concealed personal motivations and cultural meanings embodied in their patterns. Beyond all practical concerns, these weavings have in common the aim of unifying the duality of ordinary sight …

Coast Salish Textiles: From ‘Stilled Fingers’ To Spinning An Identity, Eileen Wheeler

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

When aboriginal women of south western British Columbia, Canada undertook to revisit their once prolific and esteemed ancient textile practices, the strand of cultural knowledge and expertise linking this heritage to contemporary life had become extremely tenuous. Through an engagement with cultural memory, painstakingly reclaimed, Coast Salish women began a revival in the 1980s that includes historically resonant weaving and basketry, as well as the more recent adaptive and expedient practice of knitting. This revitalization faces continuing cultural challenges as a new generation is presented with the opportunity to engage its heritage.

Through interviews with principals in this movement plus …