Another sense of fashion. Beige

nuno felt dress: wool, silk. Natural dyes: walnut

Lifetime passion

"It's a lifestyle. It's a lifetime passion. An artist needs to be ambitious and passionate. You don't work nine to five. You breathe your art twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week." (E.Shafak)

collaboration of Vilte & Irit

Belle Armoire

I think I have forgotten to show this feature on the blog. Lovely memories of the Summer too – a feature in Belle Armoire, Summer 2012, volume 12 issue 2, feat. in pg. 18-23.

Many thanks for Svetlana Batura, who made all photography for this article.

Animism. Design with the soul.

“The animal world will keep invading and transforming the life of humans represented in a more abstract and less narrative manner.
Fibre and plant are becoming dominant materials animated by organic form and skeleton structures”.

“Primitive matter and organic shapes will embody a need of man longing for a more meaningful and ritualistic relationship with earth and the elements.
Resulting in a revival of animism.
Therefore designers create brut and raw shapes that resemble totemic termite mounds, honeycomb shape, spider web laces and timber structures”.

“Can design have a soul and therefore be animated?”

I have mentioned Li Edelkoort some years ago in one of my posts here and now came across her words again when Irit shared it. There’s so much of the truth and purity in her words about trends (that we already see today!) which echo so well with my own inner feelings and believes.

And the whole trend report of her is so well worth reading:

“Post Fossil - excavating 21st century creation by Lee Edelkoort 2011
Time has come for extreme change
Society is ready to break away from last century for good.
To break with creative conventions, theoretic rules and stigmas that now are questioned, challenged and broken.
To break with a materialistic mentality replacing it with the crafted materialization of modest earth-bound and recomposed matter.
In the aftermath of the worst financial crisis in decades, a period of glamorous and streamlined design for design's sake come to an end.
A new generation of designers retrace their roots, refine their earth and research their history, sometimes going back to the beginning of time.
In this process, they form and formulate design around natural and sustainable materials, favoring timber, hide, pulp, fibre, earth and fire.
Like contemporary cavemen, they reinvent shelter, redesign tools and manmade machines, and conceptualize archaic rituals for a more modest, content and contained lifestyle.
Like a Fred Flintstone of the future.
The animal world will keep invading and transforming the life of humans represented in a more abstract and less narrative manner.
fibre and plant are becoming dominant materials animated by organic form and skeleton structures.
Our relationship with all living organisms is at stake. Therefore humans will share and care for each other.
Soon the world will discover that we are all family.
Ecology and sustainability will no longer be enough.
Primitive matter and organic shapes will embody a need of man longing for a more meaningful and ritualistic relationship with earth and the elements.
Resulting in a revival of animism.
Therefore designers create brut and raw shapes that resemble totemic termite mounds, honeycomb shape, spider web laces and timber structures; at times incorporating biotechnology into the making process to inspire design systems for the future.
Nature is a dominant ingredient in this movement, although no longer used in a naive and aspiring ecological language, but as a mature philosophy fit for newer age. Raising the questions that need to be raised.
Can we do with less to become more?
Can design have a soul and therefore be animated?
Can man find a more meaningful way to consume?
Can we break with the past and reinvent the future?
In general, materials will be matte and humble, however the earth and its hidden riches also invites this generation to employ minerals, alloys and crystals; adding lustre and sometimes even sheen to fossil-like concepts and constructions.
Laquered and polished surfaces are enhancing vegabond finds, unveiling their raw beauty while questioning the survival of the world's economy.
At times these designs will echo the essence of the arte povera movement which is bound to make a revival – soon”

Lidewij Edelkoort

The Wool Lab–trends for Summer 2013

It was really an honor to collaborate with the Wool Lab company in their trends booklet for Spring Summer 2013, - a guide to the best wool fabrics and yarns in the world. My pieces were chosen for one of the trends named PURE.

One of the most important things is to bring inspiration to people’s hearts. Isn’t it?

 

A view from above

 

my landscape

 

“I still can’t find any better definition for the word Art, than this. Nature, Reality, Truth, but with a significance, a conception, and a character which the artist brings out in it and to which he gives expression, which he disentangles and makes free”. (Vincent van Gogh)

 

P.S. I found this quotation in a book “Abstract Earth. A View from Above” by Richard Woldendorp – a collection of photographs of Australian landscapes. The book was a gift from a wonderful feltmakers’ group FeltWest in Perth where I was giving workshops. I was doing a slide show on the first night there and shared my passion for landscapes that I create in felt, and they were good listeners – gave me a most wonderful book of landscapes that will be my big inspiration when I return.

Project: Repurpose

Almost two years ago one of my clients was so excited contacting me, and she had an idea… She wanted me to repurpose her wedding dress that was sitting in the box for years. I think her excitement simply infected me and I said yes to her, let’s try this.

So the dress made its way to me over Atlantic. When I opened the big box, I had ambiguous feelings – fear to take the dress apart, excitement to repurpose it and…worry when I saw it was all synthetic and not silk as my client thought of it.

I don’t usually use anything synthetic in my pieces or projects, I don’t feel connected with the synthetics. And especially having to combine it with the natural materials… The other problem was that most of the fabric of the dress was not suitable for felting at all.

As the excitement and enthusiasm of the first moments faded away, I understood I could do nothing unless I build a connection with this fabric. I needed it to speak to me. There were dozen of times when I took it to my hands and then put it away. I took it apart, carded some fabric into fibers, and removed the embellishments to be felted on something I still didn’t know what. I was lucky to have such a wonderful client who understood my creative process and was ready to wait even for a year or more.

Concentrating my thoughts on my client, opened up my mind. Though the fabric was synthetic, it was a part of my clients image some years ago – I was sure this dress was soaking in most positive feelings, love and adoration during those times when my client was marrying a man she loved. It wasn’t just a piece of polyester to her. This was the point where the fabric could speak to me and I could listen. My work began.

It wasn’t all about felting, just a few pieces, it was more of interpretation in textiles. I applied several techniques and thought a lot about colors. I was sure the colors should be softening the feeling of synthetics and should be something that would look worth of a woman whatever her age would be. As the woman who decided to repurpose her wedding dress wants to cherish the things made of it for years or maybe a lifetime.

 

And…the best reward for this “communication” with the dress was my clients reaction – she loved every single piece. And I hope she is going to cherish it for years.

Books

There were couple of books on feltmaking published recently that included images of my felt pieces as well.

One was a very big project I would say - “500 Felt Objects” published by Lark Books.

 

First it strikes you with the versatility of what the felt can be – it is really an enormous collection of various felt pieces in different forms – from tiny crafts to art objects. Endless applications and the most diverse techniques that one ever dreamt of fulfilling or would be so much surprised to discover in this book.

 

  My "Wild Pigeon" in "500 Felt Objects"

 

 

  My "Iris Wattii" in "500 Felt Objects"

 

 

The other thing that strikes you is when you think that all of these works were collected for review in the very beginning of 2010, i.e. almost 2 years ago, and then you think what big path all those feltmakers have already travelled in their creative expressions since that time and how astonishing it must be to see all of their works at this moment.

It’s a beautiful gallery book for people who are interested in felt as a textile medium. The idea of the book was great though there are still some weaker points in its materialization I believe. The idea, design, format, and publishing claim for a solid and solemn publication, though some photos do surprise you in the lack of simplest quality and higher class of presentation of the object. And I am not speaking of the tastes here as they differ so much individually. The other thing that might surprise a person who has a better knowledge of feltmakers’ world already is the criteria the curator chose some photos of a particular author to be published. Some of them don’t really reveal the spirit of the author at all (e.g. the only yellow carpet by Claudy Jongstra and purses of Agostina Zwilling). This makes you doubt if there was enough of time for the publishers to really examine the submitted images and review the authors or maybe a little drop of energy and enthusiasm in bringing the idea to life.

Despite these two little things I felt like mentioning, it is really the book what its title says it to be – 500 Felt Objects. Creative Explorations of a Remarkable Material. A material to be discovered and explored. And get inspired! And a quite true reflection of the felt making world in present times.

 

The second book I was going to mention is written by a Russian author Ксения Шинковская - "Войлок" (“Felt”) – a little encyclopedia of many various techniques used in feltmaking. A very eclectic and informative book that included several images of my felt pieces that you can see on my Facebook page.

Becoming a character

I like to intimate the stories with my felt and the way I take photos with it. And I liked the idea of someone else continuing these stories from my photos when Lyse whom I met on Etsy asked me if she could use some of my photos for her creative works in her Imaginary World – ImagineStudio.

That’s how me with my felts became a character – Girl with the Golden Earing

…Homage to Claudel
 

The Wave

What’s in the color?

Just the other day reading the book I found a more “tangible” and scientific explanation of how the colors influence us.

"Clearly, there is more to colour than meets the eye as even blind people can literally ‘feel’ different colours with their fingertips.

Colour is not just part of the object we see in the distance, it's a light wave coming right at us. Colour is simply energy. Energy influencing our feelings, our well being, and demanding a response.” A.Wright

If color is energy, probably there’s much more encoded in this energy from the plants and therefore we have such different experiences when facing a live color from the plant rather than a “dead” synthetic color.

 

Dyed with St. John’s wort.

The Net. Connections

Meeting people, getting into mysterious situations of coincidences, especially during my recent travels with my workshop program, always deepened that feeling of the NET, the connections in our lives. There have been so many situations when I meet people who are somehow related to the people I already knew, no matter where on Earth they lived, or me myself, when I meet people I never knew in this life but got a feeling we just parted yesterday and met again, that I really stopped to wonder. I can even say I am really looking forward to every single meeting of “my people” that is yet to come. I don’t ask why I do meet those people, I am not really trying to remember what could have connected us in lives before this one, I just accept and respect every meeting. No matter what it brings – is it me or someone else paying the debts from the past lifetimes, it’s that feeling of connections in humanity, in life, the net around us and in us – it’s like closing your eyes and putting your finger on your wrist to feel the pulse of one LIFE for all that doesn’t start and doesn’t end with birth and death.

This net, the connections have been my theme lately in life, and my focus in my new felt pieces – fragile, yet strong, flowing without a start and the end – every fiber entangled with one another, embracing each other in knots that never get undone, building connections, the net…

Music by  Joe Hisaishi

 

 

 

 

“Meetings are not flowers. They do not fade and die without any traces, stepping into shadows.  … you have to open your mind and heart and to understand people not only as personally closely related, but as the companions to the truth. And then all meetings will be blessed.”   (C.Antarova “Two Lives”)

Workshop updates

Happy to announce 2 more workshops in the Netherlands this September (you can find updated info on workshop’s page) in the beautiful studio of Truus in beautiful Friesland.

 photo (c) and the piece made for  Josephus Thimister AW 2011 collection, Paris Fashion week

In the making. What is felt II

We choose a lot of things spontaneously in our lives, only later realizing the meanings of the processes. I had been a dancer for 10 years in my life and I quit dancing as I started my psychology studies. I always longed for dance and just recently realized that perhaps felt in some way has become a compensation for dancing . It’s not me who is dancing now but my hands make the wool and other fibers dance, move, entangle, interlock. If one could film this process with a macro camera, we would see a dance of these migrating fibers. Even my finished pieces have movement encoded in them, they are flowing, organic, and never static.

It’s my quote from the article that was written about me and my work in Dutch magazine about felt VILT Kontakt

Workshops

When I came back from the Netherlands I found a CD waiting for me in the post. Agostina’s (Italian Felt Academy) husband Gosta Zwilling was taking photos during the workshop and sent them to me as well. It was really interesting to see these photos after some time has passed after the workshop in Italy ended. There is always something you see and realize in the moment it is happening, and always something else that comes to your perception when the time passes.

I pay a lot of attention to working on samples during my workshops. And here are some of the samples the participants made in Italy. Their concept for the workshop was combining archaic spirit of the woman using raw fleece with modern, subtle femininity using tactile surfaces from various fabrics.

The workshop in the Netherlands was taking place in a perfect studio of Truus Huijbregts. It is always more inspiring to work in the surroundings like these and create a healthy environment for creativity in a relaxed way without the stress  that is no good at all during such workshops.

The students made lot’s of beautiful and promising samples, as well as dresses, but I didn’t take any more descent photos to be posted. One of the reasons is that after the workshop the dresses are still quite wet and the process of working with textures is not finally finished, thus I never get to see them in a full beauty, but knowing the technique and what it gives, I always know, what the students will discover when they go home with their dresses and finish them 100%.
Workshop in Belgium gave me an opportunity to meet one Lithuanian woman living in Belgium and also making felt. We had quite a lot of conversations about creativity and felt making during the workshop and the time after as Sigita accompanied me on the trips to Antwerpen where we also visited MOMU – Mode Museum with an exhibition on knitwear in fashion “Unravel”.  And I felt really happy when she sent me a photo of a dress she made straight after returning from my workshop, inspired by what we did and talked during the workshop and the knitting exhibition we saw. When I see something like that, I understand that my student got the point (which is not always easy, especially for people who are used to working just inside the box), and that my teaching is not just a mere play of techniques, it makes people create using the language I teach. And that is my goal as a teacher.


P.S. You can always check my schedule of workshops on my blog which should be updated soon with more workshops in Autumn, 2011.

Meeting and teaching

When I started something like a workshop tour in Europe this March (which started in Italy at Italian Felt Academy), I never imagined what it would bring to myself. Except of the joy or elation that one feels when the students are capable of opening up, setting themselves free and letting the creativity flow; and when the students are advanced and you don’t have to explain ordinary technical things too much, then something special starts in the class, which I could call a play of higher substances.

After returning from a very special trip to the Netherlands and then Belgium, I’ve been thinking a lot of how much this traveling has given to me. Special people, meetings, lot’s of conversations, places, mysterious coincidences, deja-vu, all the feelings that help you to understand where and why you are and where you are going or why you are doing the things that you do.

 

 a card that one of my students gave to me after the workshop: “a whole new world has opened up”. I could say the same about me…