The Ailist – Issue Sixteen – Textile Art

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Ailish Henderson

Editor in Chief at Mr X Stitch

As a freelance artist, designer, lecturer and tutor (how do I narrow down that description?!)I have been contracted by numerous arts organizations to provide Talks, Workshops’ and Masterclasses’ in Textiles, Print Making and Fine Art subjects.  These include branches of the Embroiderers’ Guild, Textile Study Groups and The Women’s Institute.  Every year I teach at The Knitting and Stitching shows and exhibit with the Artist in Action stand.Currently I am building up to my exhibition at The Spring Knitting and Stitching Show at Olympia, London this spring; having also written articles or had work illustrated in Stitch, Inspired, Embroidery, Selvedge, Daphne’s Diary, Prima (online), Cloth Paper Scissors and the Batsford book ‘Be Creative with Textile Art.'

Latest posts by Ailish Henderson

• Too Cute Tuesday – Blackwork mouse - 18 February 2020
• Shiftthink – Art-Textiles Exhibition - 17 February 2020
• Book Review – Darning by Hikaru Noguchi - 12 February 2020

This issue we are going to look at what’s on in the land of textile art out of the UK…..Recently I got the chance to hop across to Tiburg, Netherlands to visit The Textile Museum in the city to discover some awesome work.  Historically Tilburg was well known within the Textile world, thus this museum gets some awesome exhibitions as well as long running ones.  TextielMuseum, the Dutch textile museum in Tilburg, draws a great many people. Textile has played an important part in the history of the city, and you can learn all about it at the museum. There are exhibitions on both the past and the present of the textile industry.I visited the ‘Black and White’ exhibition first (on till March 2020):

There were some pretty random pieces of textile art:

The piece above was made from wedding satin, shaped by a focus on the female body and links with Greek History and winged creatures.

Black and White often get overlooked in Textiles as often its colour which is highlighted.  However it is amazing how much dark and light shades can change a piece and really prove to be effective.

The museum tells us:  ‘Colours have their own symbolism in cultures, religions and history. Black and white are, strictly speaking, not colours. However, light and dark play a major role in art and design and have various symbolic meanings. ‘Black & White | Symbolic Meaning in Art and Design’ presents works from the museum collection that show how contemporary artists and designers interpret the symbolic meaning of black and white. The exhibition features works by artists including Jorge Baldessari, Maria Roosen, Alet Pilon,Jeroen Eisinga, Marinus Boezem, Bart Hess, Célio Braga, Studio Formafantasma and Felieke van der Leest.’

I enjoyed viewing the work of artists who were unfamiliar to me due to their relation to the Netherlands as opposed to the UK.  I liked how different cultures come to work within the art genre in a different way – yet we all have the common goal of commitment to our projects.

A large focus of the musuem is the developing of new Textile Art  They have an area called the Textile Lab, where practitioners test new materials, prints and machines.  Visitors can walk around and view the machines, as long as they don’t touch!

They have a website dedicated to this section of the building, catch it here.

Here is a sneak peak of the lab….

I was rather jealous of the students and designers allowed to use this space – its all very cutting edge – I noticed loads of fashion images as I walked around, showing how the artists had used machinery to build outfits fit for the catwalks….

I mean, imagine getting to use machines like these!

See Also

The Ailist – What its really like to be a designer maker?

There are other exhibitions within the museum, maybe I will tell you more in another post sometime…..

In conclusion, really it bought it home to me how we need to look outside of the UK for textile art – there is so much out there and often its really at the edge of the Textiles industry – if we can travel and view this stuff – we should!

Of course here on our site, we have columnists from all over writing for us, which gives the site real variety.

Have you checked them all out yet?

Till next time…..