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"textile" Tag


unexpected tv crush


Thursday, April 28, 2016

switching from one tv program to another, my forefinger suddenly stops. it does not press the “+” button of the old remote control anymore (i already forgot how to use this device in the 21st century) an unknown woman on the screen catches my attention. she has wavy, dark hair, a symmetrical face with a sharp nose, beautiful lips. the tv-host asks her questions about her preferences in men (it is a dating program for adults) she carefully listens to the questions and time-to-time gazes into the screen figuring out the answer. her gaze magnifies me.

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she lives in 1996 and her name is natella. her girlfriends trust in her and can feel safe leaving their boyfriends with natella for a while. they know that she is not going to “steal” them. natella believes that a man sometimes should sacrifice his life for a woman. if a guy lives in a messy apartment – she would help him clean. being a housewife for her is boring. at an earlier state her desire was to become a man, but later became proud of being a woman. when she came on this tv-show, she intuitively felt that she was going to find her real love there. and who knows, maybe she did.

 

this is all i know about her. this is everything i could get to know from her.

 

i was thinking a lot about her and her incredible beauty. what was there that caught my eyes and stopped from surfing further around dozens of other stupid tv-shows. i believed there was a story behind her. or i wanted to believe in her/my own story. i began to fantasize…

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there is something flower’ish about her curly hair and her curly nose. she is intelligent and wealthy. good-mannered and cool. but being a “good” girl would be too boring for her. she has a very cold mind and a wrong taste in man. at least, i think so.

that makes her sad and melancholic every day. a man can never know when she leaves. or would she forever? her eyes are dark and they shine. she can have some fun with me today if i could only give a try.

she would rather prefer to sit in silence in her screaming room. or go for a long walk in the dark, lonely woods. she would never change herself because of a man. she would never try to change a man.

the more i look at the screenshots of her, the more i get into her hazel eyes. what are her fears? what was her childhood like? does she has a dark secret? what is she hiding? some old, dark secret which she keeps silent. she would never tell it to anyone, especially her man. it has an enormous power. a tremendous destruction. i am afraid of this secret and do not want to know it anymore.

 

she is a bird in a cage = a fish in an aquarium.

 

the trees are her only friends. nature is her shelter. she is a mysterious life observer and knows more about you than herself. her mind is chaotic and layered – ancient and shamanistic powers lead it. her name is natella. she comes from georgia.

there, where she comes from, the black sea meets the caucasus mountains.

there, the bright mountains and valleys are shared with god.

there, bloody red is a colour of a new beginning.

there, people are passionate types with strong feelings of devotion gained from the powerful sun.

there, people are vulnerable as pure blue shadow and they know how to control and hide it.

there, people are warriors of their solitude.

there, you can fly in the savory air or levitate in the wisdom of great waters.

there, you can be free and caught in the same time.

 

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niko pirosmani. he has the most sensitive ways of describing georgians in his great paintings. religious pale faces, indigo skies, women in shawls, men in long dresses, tired and resting pets, cold gestures and poses, almost invisible yellow seeds of sun and red scars of routine.

 

that is were i took my colours for her.

 

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complexity of circles and dots on the buds of the ‘caucasian rhododendron’. its invisible pink. grotesque and strong lines of the iris iberica. scaring wisdom of the ‘haeckel chiroptera. endless legends about the mountains growing out of the black sea. extravagancy and chic of the ‘caucasian pheasant. colourful elegancy of the rainbow trout.

 

that is were i took my shapes and tactility of her.

 

i collected everything natural i could find around me and began to recreate her in the form of a headpiece. i wanted to get inside of her skin, inside of her world, inside of her story when i put it on me/someone.

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i was looking for authenticity in the reconstructions of traditional georgian shawls. i was making garments and textiles out of horse hair, pine cones and branches. in parallel with material try-outs and sketches i was searching for the way of making a kind of an armor for my heroine. because she is an absolute warrior. but she also loves to hide – her feeling, emotions, thoughts. she needs to preserve and cultivate everything inside of her.

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i learned how to make a textile piece out of dish washing metal sponges. i also combined synthetic threads with wire in my glasses and earrings. i started to construct my piece by adding more and more layers. all the time it was not enough and soon i understood that one piece gets too complex and that i should continue my project in creating two separate concepts/designs. so, my idea does not get too messy.

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the black sea. how can i show her connection and devotion to the endlessness and power of the black sea? she is my aphrodite – feminine and warlike at the same time. she i free and bubbly as foam. she is fast and moving as the stream. she is dexterous as a fish. she sometimes gets caught in the fisherman nets. and than she becomes the most precious thing in their old grumpy hands.

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in total, the finished piece consists of four garments which get attached on the top of each other. the first layer is an entangled pattern which reminds of green sea weed usually thrown up on the coasts. it is always very tricky not to get in it while you swim. it is always cold and slimy. the second layer is more generous and floaty which refers to the sea waves – enormously strong and soft. the third layer which is attached on the ears symbolizes fishnets.  and the last top layer positions on the head and returns to the foam which always floats on the top of the water.

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after finishing this piece i felt like i have something more to say and investigate in my heroines world and personality. somehow she was still unreachable. i could not forget her and not let her go.  i was still not satisfied with the result and wanted to dig more and deeper.

 

the caucasus. in the following step my passion for not organic materials was increasingly bigger and broader. i payed more attention to the choice of colours and creation of the facial-related garment. i went back to the transparent volumes and traditional georgian head-wear and masks. the new look was totally dedicated to earth, mountains and the caucasus.

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i combined the transparency of woods, plants and branches with solid shape and colour of the naked body. formless threads and tactility of checkered, dotted materials. my main focus was on lines, stripes and their intervention. i also went deeper into the possibilities of wearing/holding the piece on the body. some garments can be hold only between squeezed teeth – some are clamped between the body and the arm.

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the new materials and concept finally gave my work the possibility of letting people experience my heroine. how it actually is to be in the skin of natella? what are her dreams and fears? how does it feel when she has to squeeze her teeth without letting her secret out? how can she live with that? or how does it feel to keep yourself focused on the others when you hardly perceive the image of the world around you, under the formless shades of narrow masks you invent. to hide, to be hidden, to be masked underwater, weaved in the landscape and faded away…

Textile writer Tania Candiani


Tuesday, November 25, 2014

 

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Tania Candiani, Woman, Mexican, 1974, Textile, Language, Artist …

 

Tania Candiani was part of the exhibition“ The future of fashion is now”, in Rotterdam. In this show, designers and artists try to show some different and new ways to see to the fashion world.

Tania Candiani exposes a big roll of fabric joined with some clothes and dresses. The finality of this work is an installation with fabrics, thread, metal hooks, sound and video. This work was showed almost at the end of the exhibition, a space that, according to me, didn’t support it as much as it could have. Therefore, all my attention wasn’t driven towards the installation as a whole, but only on this big role of fabric.

The title “ La Constancia Dormida “, which stands for Constancia Asleep, makes me think of the collections of stories, including Constancia, y otras novelas para vírgenes (1989; Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins) by the Mexican novelist and short story writer Carlos Fuentes. The theme of these stories, which is about the people and culture from Mexico City, is maybe a influence in Tania’s work.

The role of fabric, that I mentioned before, was exposed on a table and stitched with text. The language used was Spanish and it was about thoughts, feelings and stories of one certain group of people or community, that were influenced by their economic, political and social environment. This context situates her work in the last of the four themes which divided the exhibition: “Fashion Activism: Community and Politics”.

Being influenced by the reaction of these people, she used them as her subject for her story-telling. The textile is then used as a narrative tool as she explains it in one of her statement: “ My research processes take as starting point language, text, the political implications of the domestic, of what is public and private, and of “the others.”

“Translate strategies amongst systems –linguistic, visual, phonic– and practices, generates equivalences and associations (…) textiles have been present in my work as tailoring, as a narrative resource and as labor, socially embedded with meaning. Tailoring as design is a contact point with architecture, where the space distribution of the plans as sewing patterns re-signifying the idea of inhabited space or the utopia of an space that could be inhabited“.

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Tania Candiani – Artslant

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Tania Candiani – Lot 88

I chose Tania’s work because I really like the simple and minimalist way she approaches two big ideas, in one hand the fashion world and in the other one, a more conceptual idea about community in a political and economical environment. Also, the way she uses textile and combines it with text gives me a big and strong feeling of nostalgia. The way she characterizes the political and human energy really fascinates me and awoke my curiosity. This feeling of nostalgia that is present in her work, makes me land back directly to my home country. This nostalgia and spirit of story telling is something that characterizes the Portuguese personality and community, bringing me even more closer to her work.

By listening to the people in different environments, Tania tries to save the stories and the atmosphere into the fabric by sewing it, and giving it an individual perspective. Through this act of sewing, I see Tania’s work as a memorial where she keeps all the moments and happenings, as a saving for the future, which for me is a really beautiful act. The act of sewing, reminds me of a scar or a tattoo that Tania is stitching in the fabric. By expressing these left marks, it connects us to our individual or common marks, which originates from situations and memories that we experienced. These marks which makes us the person or the people that we became. So it’s like creating and materializing all the spirit, thoughts and feelings from a specific and certain place, time and community.

 

This way of making art reminds me also of some works, for example, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and in the traditional bordering from Portugal.

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Louise Bourgeois

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 Tracey Emin

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By having this in mind, I realize that textile can be really strong, powerful and expressive as a subject or a material. It was interesting to see how her work can become, in a way fashion but still textile with a sculptural character. It questioned the fashion world and trying to find or to create this small limit between fashion and textile, becoming in the end something else. Different than the world of fashion that we know now, but still an expressive future form of fashion. This makes her piece relevant, for me, in taking part of this exhibition “ The future of fashion is now “.

 

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Studio Gonnissen en Widdershoven: Fransje Killaars (1997)


Monday, March 11, 2013

Fransje Killaars is a Dutch artist who graduated from the Rijksakademie in 1984. She started with a lot of paintings, but is now well known for her installations of brightly colored textiles. Both the paintings and textiles share the importance of use of color. She is fascinated by the power of color, the relationship between people and textiles and the way textiles are bound up with daily life. Her artwork is characterized by her use of fields of bright colors placed next to or on top of each other. The colors hardly ever blend together.
The book was put together by Nikki Gonnissen and Thomas Widdershoven. It is composed of pictures and different pieces of bright textile. When Fransje went to India and visited the different textile workplaces the bright colors inspired her and convinced her to work more with textile. Her trip there directly lead to this work, where she filled an attic space with bright hand woven carpets.

 

I picked this book because I was attracted by the bright colors. The format of the book brings out Fransje Killaars’ style very well. By adding a page of colored fabric in between pictures of her installations it gives the audience a sense of the touch and the brightness of the carpets in the room. The pictures in the book are also pictures of the textiles in more every day environments rather than a lot of the pictures which you see when you Google the artist. I find the pictures in a more natural environment far more interesting than in a gallery space, which I believe brings more justice to her work because she is interested in the way textiles are bound up in daily life.

I personally love the physical use of color for example in everyday objects, clothing or textiles, especially bright, hard colors more than pale or pastels. I am also very attracted to the contrast between the colors, which Fransje Killaars also uses in her work. As you can see the bright shades are placed next to each other, striped or polka dotted. This emphasizes the difference and variety of the colors, rather than blending them together. This in combination with texture is even more appealing to me. Being able to hold the color and attach the sense of touch to it, moving them around and placing them next to new colors I find very exciting and this is exactly what Fransje seems to be doing in her textile works.

 


DRESS-INDEX #7


Monday, February 11, 2013

Gerrit Rietveld Academy. The building were I spend the most of my one hundred sixty eight hours the week has to offer. The building were I drink the most of my coffee , which I pick up in the canteen on the ground floor.

The canteen. There is my starting point.

When I look around I see a diagram of the clothes worn in Gerrit Rietveld. The canteen is a meeting point, were people from all departments as well as teachers and visitors take their coffee and have their meals. I find it interesting to sit there and look around. Nobody can know what I am thinking about and nobody cares.

I find it nice to look at the textiles, and since my background is in tailoring maybe it is almost an old habit. I try to realize if there is any trend going on. Is there particularly much of some certain kind of fabric? Printed? Colorful? Patch worked? Second hand? Do we have more woven fabric visible or is it knitted, felted or even leather fabric we see? And what content do the fibers have. Are they made out of processed animal hair or plants so we can call them natural? Or are they more on the synthetic spectrum? Sometimes it is hard to see and then it comes to guessing…

After writing randomly down what is to see in the canteen on a regular day I decided to make myself a system; to take snapshots and analyze them. I took one before lunch and one in the lunch brake. By analyzing the photographs, which should give me a quite good overview on the average dress code in the academy, I calculated the ratio between the textile fibers and the processes they have been put in.

As you can see the ratio between the natural fibers and the once that are either synthetic or mixed with synthetics is 40 % versus 60 %. That means that out of 5 cloths 2 will be made out of natural fibers and 3 of synthetic related material.

On the other histogram you can see that woven and knitted material is what we have most of in our surrounding, but since shoes are often made of leather, the leather bar has some value as well.

 

When it came to making an outfit related to the research I decided to choose weaving as a method, since weaving and knitting are the main processes of the fibers in Rietveld surrounding according to my results. I wanted to work with raw material, and since wool and cotton are the most common natural fibers in (Rietveld) clothing I choose to work with sheep wool among with fish skin, which I count as leather. The weaving I did in a very primitive  way to match the rest of the working process. I wanted to keep the process of the fiber out of my work, and that worked better in combination with very course weaving. The headpiece I made to make more harmony in the outfit, since the woolen outfit is quite overwhelming on its own and in that way I could also represent a suitable ratio of leather in the outfit according to my research.

At last I wanted to show layers, since we most of the times have many layers on ourselves in everyday life. I decided to stick with the raw material and the weaving method worked well for this. I took several kinds of plastic, which can be recycled and processed into textile fibers, as well as fish skin and bast, and wove them into the structure.



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