All that remains . . .

 

Left in a field and decomposed for about a 20 year period, this is a pair of Wrangler jeans is now down to its toxic skeleton of leaving behind only synthetic fibers and the metal hardware. It is facinating to see what the world cannot digest and it is plastic! Found near Sacramento by @darnvintage about 6 years ago at an estate sale and now part of the Wrangler Archives. (thanks)

Mary Shelby

 

Mary Shelby’s fascination with buttons began after seeing her mother’s button box. As her own collection grew, along with an interest in quiltmaking and design, Shelby imagined a quilt made entirely of buttons. Using 11,923 flat buttons attached to what was likely a white tablecloth with a lace trim, she adapted a Friendship Quilt pattern published in the Kansas City Star in 1938.

Cassie Arnold

Cassie Arnold's exploration of femininity through her knitted mum bra series.

Jonathon Baldock II

 

Jonathan Baldock has also makes performative costumes as part of his art. These costumes were made for The Kokoro Dance Theatre Society's LSD 'Love Sex and Death' 

Jonathan Baldock I

 Jonathan Baldock has just had an exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, I have to admit I didn't get to it on my latest trip, time had been spent gloriously exploring Sheffield (first time ever) with my great friend and we didn't get to YSP until late in the afternoon. These examples are not from this exhibition though, these are more exclusively textile applique from an exhibition in 2019 at Stephen Friedman Gallery

Rima Day

 

Rima Day is an Americaan textile artist who is currently making fabric books currently investigating the idea that needle and thread for her is the same as pen and ink for a writer. Her work has for some time been focused on shear fabric combined with venal red thread.

Shradha Kochhar

 

Shradha Kochhar sculpts and draws with textiles. I love and am therefore featuring her sheer compositions for their scale, delicacy and the light play that they cause. 

Murray Odessky

Murray Odessky's (1931-2015)  journey making hats began serendipitously on a New Year's Eve in 1979 when he brought some things to a party in a paper bag.  When he went home, he emptied a size 12 bag and turned it over his head.  It was a good fit, and he formed it into a hat. Thank you

 Having moved to Hawaii and changed his name to Moses he revisited his love of hat making as a way to  protect himself from the strong Hawaiian sun. His designs kept coming, each hat inspired by a person, thing or idea, so that over roughly a decade Moses created over 250 hats 

His background as a a package and graphic designer for Mattel and other firms informed his work. Up until the last weeks of his life he could still be found at the Starbucks in Kamuela wearing one of his paper bag hats. He donated all his hats to the Mingei Museum in San Diego.

Delaine Le Bas

Last week I went to the phenomenal exhibition 'Unfolding'  by Delaine Le Bas at Tramway Glasgow, it is on until the 13th of October and is so so worth visiting, a rich and pertinent evocation of despair and creative anger at systematic discrimination and injustice where Delaine uses sculpture, textiles, painting and installation to pull together a vibrant compelling narrative. Here I have shared her highly embellished figures and textiles. 

"Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding is an exhibition of work by artist Delaine Le Bas presented within an expansive and layered installation. Delaine’s objects, environments, textiles, costumes and performances exist at the intersection of the personal and the political, aligning their experiences as a Romani person with perspectives on land, movement, gender, and discrimination. 

Across the exhibition, Delaine evokes forms of social and psychological commentary through the recurrent use of texts, the reactivation of personal and archival ephemera, and symbols from classical mythology and popular culture. The installations are populated by a cast of extraordinary figures such as goddesses, visionaries and witches, applying a feminist lens to narratives of both emancipation and domination.

Tramway was previously the Glasgow site of  'To Gypsyland', 2013, a travelling research project by Delaine and collaborator Barby Asante that explored Romani, Gypsy and Traveller presence in cities across the UK. In the intertwining of elements from past projects with new figures and narratives, Delainia reflects the ongoing address in the work of the mythologisation and demonisation of Romani, Gypsy and Traveller peoples in the UK and Europe. These concerns are amplified within present-day contexts of housing crisis, border control, forced displacement and environmental breakdown. Delaine’s work activates and reclaims space for new rituals and imaginaries of resistance against historical and contemporary environments of hostility." Delaine Le Bas