Thursday, 17 March 2016

A Collection

To coincide with the Fibre Arts@Ballarat workshops this year there will be an exhibition of tutor's work entitled A Collection at The Lost Ones Gallery in Camp Street Ballarat from 16 March to 3rd April.
View of exhibition at the Lost Ones Gallery
This exhibition has been curated by Tara Poole from RIIS Strategic Consulting and will provide a wonderful snapshot of the talent and creativity of the tutors at this year's workshops.  It will give the general public an idea of what goes on at the Ballarat Grammar School when the boarders are away during the Easter holidays, and hopefully inspire some of them to try the workshops for themselves.
I am so looking forward to this year's class, to meet up with hundreds of like-minded fibre enthusiasts and to have a break from cooking and cleaning (and moving house) for a week. It is always inspiring to meet the other tutors, to go for daily walks around the lake, check out the botanic gardens and spend a whole week just exploring natural dyes and mordants in a well-organised and extremely fun working holiday.

Sunday, 13 March 2016

Hand/Eye Magazine

























I have been a follower of the Hand/Eye magazine for sometime so it was a great surprise to get an email from Jessica Hemmings to say that my chapter for her book Cultural Threads had been featured in the latest online edition. If you haven't read the book yet, you can see my full article here:
http://handeyemagazine.com/content/generate

Saturday, 5 March 2016

Asian Textile Studies

A few weeks ago I was contacted by two asian textiles collectors, David and Sue Richardson from the UK who have started their own website, Asian Textile Studies. They had found my blog over the internet and wanted to know if they could use some of the photos I had taken of my cloths that I had dyed whilst I was artist in residence at Rimbun Dahan in 2013. Specifically, they were after brown dyes for their last chapter on the website.

Rambutan skins with alum (left) and iron (right) on different silks

Mangosteen skins with alum on cotton (left) and 3 types of silk
Their email to me came just in time - I have been working hard in the studio to finish off a number of naturally dyed textiles for an upcoming group exhibition  about my time in Malaysia, entitled Here & There. So of course I have been cutting up these larger pieces of cloth to use in my exhibition.  If the email had come any later I would not have had anything to give them for their website!

Here & There  will be shown at the Belconnen Art Centre in late April, so I will write a more descriptive post about the exhibition closer to the time.

More photos of my work can be found on the Asian Textile Studies website here.