photos: ken ewen, gerard bordeleau, david irvine, a. micic Tapestries, weavings, all of the textile arts are done with deliberation. No one weaves a rug in a day. The artist works slowly and carefully. As time slows, other meanings, other stories, appear. The viewer sees this and walks a little bit slower, stays a bit…
photos: aisha khalid and gandhara art The National College of Arts, Pakistan’s premier art school, was a rare sanctuary of culture during the Ziaul Haq period. It subverted the norm, and nurtured and educated a body of men and women drawn from the furthermost reaches of the country including its urban centres. For young students…
photos: peter stone Matthew Harris’ work is immediately striking for its unique language of gentle yet beautifully chaotic assembling of patched, joined, printed and stitched surfaces. The intense visual vocabulary draws on a catalogue of sources; in Harris’ own words, it is a “bringing together and condensing of multiple visual references, scraps of things seen…
bengal gallery of fine arts, dhaka16 – 30 january, 2015 photos: mizanur rahman khoka and kamrul hasan mithon Nicola Strippoli Tarshito’s ‘Embroider the World’ exhibition weaves together legacies and heritages across cultures. Creation through cultural collaboration and appropriation is a major theme in all ofTarshito’s work but, Tarshito is also an innovator and inventor who…
photos: zeb bilal and the watson catalogues In 1866, J. Forbes Watson, a reporter for the Products of India, at the India Museum, compiled a series of eighteen volumes entitled, The Collections of the Textile Manufactures of India. Comprising seven hundred indigenous handcrafted specimens of textiles, these Catalogues document the wide variety of textiles that…
photos: niaz zaman & amiya kanti chakma To retain or revive traditional weaving, the right incentive must be given as well as the realisation created that indigenous weaving is not only a functional product but also a work of art and the preservation of a unique culture. Backstrap weaving was carried out extensively in the…
photos: courtesy of aasim akhtar Though very contemporary and untraditional, Faith Ringgold’s, Pinaree Sanpitak’s and Kimsooja’s practices retain their association with their traditionally female genre. At the same time they are dramatic narratives that are difficult to categorise. abolish the distance that separates art from life is a constant desire found in the art of…
31 july – 26 september, 2015photos: courtesy of klein trust, jed gordon and stuart armitt The connection between textiles and art has been addressed repeatedly by artists and designers alike, but no one has forged that link quite as well as Bernat Klein – who combined his skills as a painter, and the process behind…
photos: courtesy of the indus valley school of art and architecture How do you make use of an environment which is so exciting that it offers three disciplines within the school, which showcase their undergraduate final theses at the end of each year? You admire the work in its isolated, compartmentalised space and go back…
drik gallery, dhakafebruary, 2016photos: shahidul alam, saiful islam and tapash paul “The fineness of the cloths is difficult to describe, the skin of the moon removed by the executioner-star would not be so fine. One would compare it with a drop of water if that drop fell against nature, from the fount of the sun……
