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ARTIST STATEMENT | Kathy Schicker | website | CV
I am a British textile designer and a large body of my
work is image-based digital Jacquard weaving.
I am drawn to this practice because marries two
passions: photography and weaving. It enables me to
translate striking images and poignant family portraits
into woven fabric and lets me explore themes of
home, family, memory and loss with an intimacy
inherent to textiles.
Weaving these family photographs and watching them
develop line by line on the loom becomes, for me,
akin to reconstructing lost family relationships and
weaving together past and present.
My Jacquard practice has always been interwoven
with Canada, especially with the Centre for
Contemporary Textile in Montreal, where I first
studied the practice and continue to have work
produced.
I have also an ongoing passion and fascination with
light and new technology, which lead me recently to
study the Masters in Design for Textile Futures at
Central St Martins College, London. UK. The course
focuses on issues including sustainability, the
understanding and use of new materials, new
technologies and the delivery of multidisciplinary arts
projects.
In my major project, Woven Light, I created woven
textiles that change colour in sunlight and glow in the
dark. This reversible change magically reveals
patterns and images. I am currently continuing with
developing the Woven Light products with my new
textile design collective, Puff and Flock.
I am a British textile designer and a large body of my
work is image-based digital Jacquard weaving.
I am drawn to this practice because marries two
passions: photography and weaving. It enables me to
translate striking images and poignant family portraits
into woven fabric and lets me explore themes of
home, family, memory and loss with an intimacy
inherent to textiles.
Weaving these family photographs and watching them
develop line by line on the loom becomes, for me,
akin to reconstructing lost family relationships and
weaving together past and present.
My Jacquard practice has always been interwoven
with Canada, especially with the Centre for
Contemporary Textile in Montreal, where I first
studied the practice and continue to have work
produced.
I have also an ongoing passion and fascination with
light and new technology, which lead me recently to
study the Masters in Design for Textile Futures at
Central St Martins College, London. UK. The course
focuses on issues including sustainability, the
understanding and use of new materials, new
technologies and the delivery of multidisciplinary arts
projects.
In my major project, Woven Light, I created woven
textiles that change colour in sunlight and glow in the
dark. This reversible change magically reveals
patterns and images. I am currently continuing with
developing the Woven Light products with my new
textile design collective, Puff and Flock.
ARTIST STATEMENT | Joe Lewis
I was a visual artist who painted. My paintings began
to be multi paneled and quilt like in appearance. I
moved to quilting quite naturally and brought to it the
element of collage which had been part of my visual
vocabulary. Photographic images where a part of that
vocabulary. Transferring photographs onto cloth using
a number of different methods maintained continuity
in my work. I stumbled across an image entitled 'Miss
Pink Shoes Returns to America' by Lisa Lee and Skif
Peterson, and it was identified as a work made from
cotton, linen and rayon, measuring 30” x 40’. This
piece had been made on a computerized jacquard
loom at the Montreal Centre for Contemporary
Textiles.
Miss Pink Shoes in Fibrearts magazine set of alarm
bells in my head. This made perfect sense to me. I
googled and found the Montreal Centre for
Contemporary Textile and their Jacquard workshops.
After a first visit and producing a piece with a
photograph at its core I became completely
enamoured of the possibility.
I am now a weaver who uses weave structure to
make images. It is the placement of interlaced
coloured yarns side by side above and below that fills
the “picture pane” and makes the image appear that
appeals to me. In my approach to using the computer
assisted Jacquard design and weaving, it is the act of
developing of weave structures that places colour
beside colour to produce variations of new colour with
shadings along with variations of texture and pattern
to produce the surface which intrigues me as an artist.
To place this system of combining colour to build an
image in an art historical context it is easy to point to
the pointillist technique of George Seurat. An artist
who was born at the time when the jacquard loom had
been firmly established in industrial textile production
you can wonder what influence jacquard textiles had
on Seurat.
But that is a question for another time.
I was a visual artist who painted. My paintings began
to be multi paneled and quilt like in appearance. I
moved to quilting quite naturally and brought to it the
element of collage which had been part of my visual
vocabulary. Photographic images where a part of that
vocabulary. Transferring photographs onto cloth using
a number of different methods maintained continuity
in my work. I stumbled across an image entitled 'Miss
Pink Shoes Returns to America' by Lisa Lee and Skif
Peterson, and it was identified as a work made from
cotton, linen and rayon, measuring 30” x 40’. This
piece had been made on a computerized jacquard
loom at the Montreal Centre for Contemporary
Textiles.
Miss Pink Shoes in Fibrearts magazine set of alarm
bells in my head. This made perfect sense to me. I
googled and found the Montreal Centre for
Contemporary Textile and their Jacquard workshops.
After a first visit and producing a piece with a
photograph at its core I became completely
enamoured of the possibility.
I am now a weaver who uses weave structure to
make images. It is the placement of interlaced
coloured yarns side by side above and below that fills
the “picture pane” and makes the image appear that
appeals to me. In my approach to using the computer
assisted Jacquard design and weaving, it is the act of
developing of weave structures that places colour
beside colour to produce variations of new colour with
shadings along with variations of texture and pattern
to produce the surface which intrigues me as an artist.
To place this system of combining colour to build an
image in an art historical context it is easy to point to
the pointillist technique of George Seurat. An artist
who was born at the time when the jacquard loom had
been firmly established in industrial textile production
you can wonder what influence jacquard textiles had
on Seurat.
But that is a question for another time.