Sunday, January 18, 2009

craftwork.

I've been really into fiber arts lately and fortuitously discovered a bunch of great artists at once. Here are some of my favorites:

Sandra Sheehy



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"Sandra Sheehy was born in Norfolk in 1965 and studied illustration at Maidstone College of Art but never pursued this career. She began making embroidery pictures in 1988. When she begins a new piece, she has no plan in mind: 'I start at the centre and the work unfolds to me... the constant feeling is of the repeating patterns of life that range from the microscopic to the ever-expanding universe.'" (from England & Co.)

Aya Kakeda


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"
Aya was born and raised in Tokyo Japan.

She now works and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

She likes Cats, seals , and receiving postcards and she has ever changing weekly obsessions, now it’s the French language and star nosed mole." (from flux factory.)

Aya draws and paints in addition to embroidering.

Jenny Hart

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"Jenny Hart (b. 1972) is an artist based in Austin, Texas. She is also the founder Sublime Stitching, a design company launched in 2001 to revitalize the craft of hand embroidery. Jenny's work has appeared in publications such as Spin, Nylon, Rolling Stone, Venus, The Face, Bust and Juxtapoz. She is the author of three titles for Chronicle Books (San Francisco) and her design work won PRINT Magazine's Regional Design Annual award (2005). Jenny has worked with The Flaming Lips, collaborated with The Decemberists, and comic artists Dame Darcy and Mitch O'Connell. Her work is in the collections of Carrie Fisher, Tracey Ullman and Elizabeth Taylor. Jenny was a panelist at the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival and a featured speaker at the 2007 Maker Faire Austin." (from her website.)

Sandra Golbert

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"This artist creates sculptures, collages, quilts, watercolors and artists' books. She makes her own handmade paper and paints silk with cold water dyes, using these materials to construct her artwork. Several major hotels display her fiber art murals and installations. Her work is also exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and the Caribbean." (from her website.)

{discovered via Little Yellow Bird, another great fiber artist}

Sarah Illenberger

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She mostly works with paper and other materials (food included), but her stuff is too good to exclude from this post.

"Defining one category for all the work of Sarah Illenberger is no easy task. The forms the visual translations of her themes assume are far too diverse. What initially sounds quite abstract, in reality, is mostly practical in that her creations are not generated on a computer but rather by meticulous handwork, sometimes incorporating the most mundane materials. A story about love-sickness is visualised through an embroidered design. Variously coloured tablets are used to compose portraits for a magazine. And in Sarah’s hands, beauty products are given new life by being transformed into tourist landmarks. Whatever she creates, it is done with a humorous touch and a great love for detail. Each assignment leads to a unique work of art, sometimes visually enhancing the content of a feature, sometimes to be considered a work in its own right. In her Berlin studio, Sarah Illenberger develops concepts for editorial as well as commercial clients. She mostly works alone, but occasionally teams up with a photographer." (from her site.)

Special thanks to Christos for telling me about Aya Kakeda and Jenny Hart.

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