I recently went to the SIT Select Showcase and talks, it was great day filled with creative people.
The Showcase was basically a craft fair but the standard of work was amazing. My two personal favourites were Mayumi Keneko and Helen London. Mayumi Keneko hand weaves fabric using paper yarn and folds the fabric in an origami-type way. My favourite pieces she had out on display at the Showcase are unfortunately not on her website. These pieces were small creations folded in to detailed shapes in the traditional origami way, beautiful and intricate. Helen London is a silversmith who produces wonderfully delicate silver jewellery.
There were a lot of interesting speakers there too, I went to talks by Mary-Rose Watson, Penny Wheeler, Ismini Samandou, Jilly Edwards and Theo Wright.
Mary-Rose Wheeler‘s work is very interesting, as a weaver she uses a warp and a weft but not on a loom and not always interlinking. She creates her work on a frame by wrapping the warp and weft around it simultaneously. At first the three dimensional nature was coincidental but she has now developed and enhanced this aspect. She dyes all of her own yarns and only uses rayon, she likes the way the light reflects and changes the colour. My favourite collections are the Feather series and Pennine series. I am not so keen on the pieces where she has added extra yarn, I feel it distracts from the beautiful simplicity of her work.
Penny Wheeler is a weaver and artist. She has worked on many interesting projects including growing herbs in a shift dress. She was part of the Z Twist project celebrating the high quality textiles produced in Somerset. The Quantock Weavers were also an inspiration for one of her projects where she wove fabric based on stones.
Ismini Samandou‘s work is all about reproducing natural surfaces through woven textures, mostly using a Jacquard loom. Before she started weaving her main interest was in photography. She is always trying to create something new that no one has done before. Currently, she is very interested in clouds and time, and where you are in relation to these. Textiles with a narrative and meaning, and the God of Arachne are also very influential. She has completed many residencies including with the Crafts Council in Bangladesh and an Anni Albers residency in Connecticut. Her work is beautiful and well worth a look.
Jilly Edwards is a tapestry weaver who weaves on a range of scales. The very large scale pieces are produced on scaffolding that she has bought for her studio space. Her inspiration comes from her constant collecting of ‘stuff’ she finds anywhere and everywhere as well as her drawing. When she weaves her pieces (all sizes) she creates a drawing to scale to place behind the tapestry as she is making it.
Theo Wright, for most of his life, has been a computer scientist and greatly interested in mathematics. 30 years after he started his Computer Science degree he started his Textiles degree. He realised his interest in textiles when he looked back at all of the things he had collected from travels and realised that they were all textiles based, he was also knitting as a hobby. He taught himself to weave as a hobby at home before pursuing a degree. His woven work is all based on his mathematics interests, using permutation theories to work out and arrange his threading and weaving structures. Instead of using weave programs to design structures he uses Excel, creating equations that will produce many different designs for him. Colour isn’t a major part of his work, the thing he focuses on is contrast, his use of light or dark yarns. For me his work is not so pleasing visually but the way he uses mathematics in weaving is fascinating.
My day at the SIT Select showcase was very inspirational. Going to events like this keeps me excited about textiles and craft, and my motivation high.