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Threads, needlework and fabrics shake off the crafts categorization and emerge as an artistic medium to be explored and celebrated.
From elaborate handmade embroidery and cross-stitched samplers to technical, hyper-photographic tapestries, the usages of threads and textiles in art are rich and intricate.
The studio of Angelo Filomeno, an Italian artist based in New York, could be mistaken for that of a couturier. A sewing machine lies on a table, surrounded by spools of thread, silk shantung, beads and crystals. For Filomeno, who worked as a designer for Gianni Versace, Mila Schön and Raffaella Curiel in Milan after his fine art studies, creates painstakingly exquisite artworks using fabrics and embroidery as his medium. His opulent artworks often depict dark, macabre subjects such as skulls, skeletons, butterflies and cockroaches embellished with glittering ornamentation and needlework.
"Instead of drawing with a pencil or a brush, I draw with my zigzag machine," says Filomeno, who was apprenticed to a tailor at the age of seven. "When I started doing this in 2001, some people said to me, 'Oh, but it's very difficult to become successful in this medium.' But I was very ambitious in pushing my work."
Filomeno's determination has paid off. His works were included in the Venice Biennale in 2007 and he is one of 48 artists featured in the exhibition "Pricked: Extreme Embroidery" at the city's Museum of Arts & Design. The latter follows on from the museum's earlier show, "Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting." Both shows have explored how contemporary artists are rejuvenating centuries-old traditions by employing threads, embroidery and fabrics to create satirical, humorous or ironic works. Exhibitions along similar themes have been held in European galleries, underscoring the growing interest in this medium.
Sometimes taking inspiration from Robert Morris and Claes Oldenburg's fabric-based installations in the 1970s, the French artist Julie Legrand uses threads as the primary element of her installations. Her piece "Rose" (2007), which was presented in this winter's exhibition "Subtil Textile" at Galeries Lafayette in Paris, features rolling hills of multicolored threads amassed onto a mirrored plinth. Some of the threads cascade like puddles onto the floor. "I'm interested in how something very fine can become a mass and how, through the process of accumulation, the threads assume a thickness and a body," she explains. "Before, no-one would have dared show a cascade of threads like this, as it were a spillage of paint."
A daring attitude keen on reinterpretation often applies. This is how the American-born London-based artist Kate Westerholt started making quirky samplers, adding snippets of contemporary culture to eighteenth-century colonial American embroidery motifs. Describing her works as a "cross-stitch time clash" and "a visual joke," she integrates expressions such as "Bless this crack house" or "Blingin' innit?" into quaint designs of birds, flowers and characters in period dress. "I see parallels in the arts and crafts movement at the end of the nineteenth century, when people got tired of mass-manufactured goods and wanted things more unusual made with love and care," she opines. Her works have proved a hit, selling to the likes of Damon Albarn.
Significantly, Westerholt cites the general trend in sewing and knitting that is sweeping through Western culture as being of relevance. "There's a crafts movement in the populace, with knitting groups, which first began in Austin, Texas, taking place in nearly every city. I would much rather invite two or three friends round for the evening, crack open a bottle of wine and sew than watch Big Brother."
Other artists use textiles, sewing or crocheting as one aspect of a multimedia body of work. Joana Vasconcelos, who represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale in 2001, dresses traditional sculptures in crochet designs to create cultural juxtapositions and makes abstract sculptural installations from variable materials, including velvet and lace that she adorns with tassels, buttons and beads. Meanwhile, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington's "Still-Style" pictures, created from printed fabrics, form one part of her artistic laboratory. "Making these textile pictures enabled me to incorporate all the ideas that I had about structure, cut, volume and architecture onto a canvas," says the French artist.
Threads also appear on canvases, as is the case with Michael Raedecker and Alighiero e Boetti. Raedecker, a Dutch-born London-based artist who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2000, uses threads to delineate his monochrome still-life and landscape paintings. Like Filomeno, he has a background in fashion. By hand-stitching lines of thread and wool across his paintings, Raedecker distresses the canvas, his needlework denoting an ambience of shadowy, fading memories.
Alternatively, Boetti had entire canvases embroidered by hand. The late Italian conceptual artist was known for often conceiving an idea for an artwork and leaving its design and execution to others, recruiting people from all walks of life to carry out his concepts. He would invite friends, relatives and groups of students from art schools to create some of his designs, which were translated to kilims woven by Afghani refugees living in Peshawar, Pakistan. Among his best-known works are his tapestries of maps, created from 1971 to 1992.
Running parallel to these developments is the technical advancement of digital loom files, allowing artists to make hyper-photographic tapestries. This means that scans of photographic images can be converted into high quality pixellated weave files. Even though it's a complicated process to get the tones right, artists such as Chuck Close, Pae White and Craigie Horsfield have jumped at the chance of translating their ideas into woven threads. "You keep weaving tests and making alterations, changing the instructions that you're giving the loom," explains Close.
Close's nine-foot-high tapestries are based on his portrait daguerreotypes, while White's tapestries for bedspreads and furniture are based on abstract scans of crinkling kitchen foil or other scanned images. And Horsfield has made a brilliantly vibrant tapestry portraying a seething nightclub in Madrid based on a film-still. It used two kilometers of thread and took three months to make.
"The technical possibilities are changing year by year," enthuses Horsfield. "Up until now, the majority of tapestries being made in this way were for decorative or applied art. The kinds of requests from contemporary artists are very different as they are looking for unfamiliar modifications."
Indeed, whether in artisanal, crafts-inspired work or technical tapestries, the potential for thread in contemporary art is asserting itself in exciting ways.
"Pricked: Extreme Embroidery" is at the Museum of Arts & Design from November 8, 2007, through April 27, 2008. Address: 40 West 53rd Street, New York NY 10019. T. +1 212 956 3535. www.madmuseum.org.
Angelo Filomeno's show "Betrayed Witches" is at Galerie Lelong from March 6 through April 12, 2008. Address: 528 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001. T. +1 212 315 0470. www.galerie-lelong.com
Useful links:
Angelo Filomeno
www.annedevillepoix.com
Julie Legrand
www.anton-weller.com
Kate Westerholt
www.katewesterholt.com
Joana Vasconcelos
www.joanavasconcelos.com
www.galerie-obadia.com
Raphaële Bidault-Waddington
www.raffineriepoetique.fr
http://france.fiction.free.fr/
Michael Raedecker
www.hauserwirth.com
Chuck Close
www.xippas.com
www.whitecube.com
Pae White
www.neugerriemschneider.com
www.galleriafrancescakaufmann.com
Craigie Horsfield
www.frithstreetgallery.com
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