Highlights from ‘Threadwork: Women Redefining Fabric Art’

The digital realm is an increasingly reliable platform to exhibit and even experience art, but what about mediums that hold three-dimensionality and texture in their DNA? The skyrocketing popularity of textiles within the art sector in recent years prompts curators, organizations, and collectors to seek a range of means to present the most recent and experimental in the practice. This duality encouraged Saatchi Art associate curator India Balyejusa and assistant curator Siting Wang to organize the group exhibition “Threadwork: Women Redefining Fabric Art” on their online platform.

“Saatchi Art has always been an online gallery, way before the pandemic,” Balyejusa says, noting the rise in virtual exhibitions since 2020. “After 13 or so years, the technology has improved but we still work with our exhibiting artists in the same way, most importantly making sure they photograph their work as detailed as possible.” This crispness in detail is particularly crucial for the 17 women artists exhibiting at “Threadwork.” They explore the methods artists engage with textiles today under the influence of technology, climate awareness, and identity politics. “Textiles tap onto a straddle between two and three dimensions,” Balyejusa adds, “they are so tactile but they still can be exhibited on a wall.”

The main thread (pun intended) throughout the show is the material’s prominence as a historically female-identifying means of self-expression. From defying fiber’s association with craft as an inferior practice next to high art to the possibilities that technology has granted artists in production methods, the show’s participants engage with contemporary textiles in fresh ways. “It has been with the feminist movements that fiber art started to be considered fine art,” says Balyejusa. Tapestry, sculpture, needlework, knitting, as well as works that refuse direct classification appear in the online show.

Scrolling down the exhibition website, the visitors encounter works by the likes of Jeeyon ‘G’ Roslie, Susan Smereka, Amadi Greenstein, Puja Bhakoo, Femke van Gemert, Carmen Mardonez, Andie Grande, Vanessa Valero, Thera Hillenaar, or Demi Overton. Breadth in geography is perhaps the show’s biggest advantage. From Japan to India, France, the Netherlands, United States and United Kingdom, artists with studios in various parts of the globe unite in the inclusivity of the digital realm. Unconventional materials on the other hand constitute another important element of the check list. Plastics, leather, or acrylics, for example, are among the mediums artists explore in ways that include 3-D printing with fabrics.

Female Fiber Artists Showcase Their Work in Saatchi Art Exhibition

Thera Hillenaar

Female Gaze

The Dutch artist is a recent addition to Saatchi Art’s platform but she was one of the first artists who grabbed Balyejusa’s attention when she began exploring the artist pages on the platform for the show. “Seeing that she works with leather as a medium was very exciting,” says the curator. Densely assembled, various cuts of leather interject other soft materials such as felt in this energetically abstract wall piece. Hillenaar captures a mantra-like mystery in her arrangement of colorful fabrics in a tight configuration.

Andie Grande

Summer of Dreams

Another newcomer to the platform, the French artist Andie Grande intrigued the curator with her “decompositional” approach to weaving in a way that flirts with sculpture. Working with discards wrappings, she orchestrates intricately chaotic compositions that in the case of this work drapes from its frame. The material’s past life and role in the environment crisis meet with Grande’s elegant handling of different colors and cuts of plastic.

Susan Smereka

Harbinger

An energetic serenity inhabits Smereka’s woven monotype on paper wall piece in bright pink. The artist uses various forms of paper, including family photos, letters, and found printed media, to cut in various shapes and print monochromic colors on, followed by her process of machine-sewing the pieces together. Layered and textured, the abstract work holds traces from the materials’ past lives.

Carmen Mardonez

Imaginary Topographies

Discarded pillows and bedsheets provide the base for Mardonez’s three dimensional work which also features yarn, cotton, and fabric. The intimacy embodied in bedding materials is enveloped by colorful threads that eventually yield a mysteriously corporal work that resembles intertwined bodies as well as colorful mountains. The inspiration that the Chilean artist finds in California where she lives is reflected in homages to natural landscapes and light associated with the west coast.

Leili Khabiri

Silent are The Ghosts of Stones

The Iranian British artist’s practice of hand-weaving is not only a productive curiosity but also a meditative exploration of history, lineage, and the self. Using elements from poetry, dream journals, and oral histories, Khabiri weaves both figurative and abstract elements together, blending the immediacy of written words with subtlety of drawing. Minimal and intimate, lines of yarn unite in works such as Silent are The Ghosts of Stones, which operates like a visual poetry or a sketchbook, yet written in fabric.

Jeeyon ‘G’ Roslie

Aquarius

Vibrant colors dominate ‘G’ Roslie’s energic tapestry that replicates a sunrise backdropped by a pink sky. A lush greenery which also resembles a waterfall accompanies the dawn, or maybe the arrival of the sunset? It is this bright mystery that energizes her tapestry which hangs from a wooden beam. The artist’s play with colors and forms salutes the genre of painting and pays homage to artists who pair nature’s own forms with abstraction to juxtapose their own spiritual visual lexicons.

Puja Bhakoo

Fragmented PB/FM-01

The female form finds its direct representation in Bhakoo’s fiber painting of a woman. Portraying the figure fragmented, partially with the lower half of her face and shoulder lets the Indian artist grapple not only with complexity of the self but also hints at notions of process, patience, and meditation which are all associated with the practice of weaving. Balanced with a pointillist abstraction with the other half of the vertical tapestry, the female figure inhabits the fiber surface with confidence and precision.

Vanessa Valero

Topography

A potpourri of textures and colors renders Valero’s wall-hung work as irresistibly vivacious. From powdery pink to earth brown and alluring red, vibrant colors radiate soft textures, including tassels that sprout from the work’s fuzzy surface. The Colombian artist’s composition has a topographic feel, like lakes or fields observed from a bird’s eye view, with the tassels accentuating the surface like gushes of wind or a summer rain. 

Behind ‘Fibration,’ New York Textile Month’s Main Exhibition

The brainchild of trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort and her business partner Philip Fimmano, New York Textile Month surveys a vast array of talents and collective initiatives looking to revive and innovate age-old fiber and fabric craft traditions. Encompassing a robust calendar of talks, walks, workshops, studio tours, and exhibitions throughout September, the festival—now in its eighth edition—paints a comprehensive picture of how this tired-and-true medium is being approached by today’s practitioners. With events accessible to the general public and, in some cases, available through digital streaming, New York Textile Month communicates how the medium continues to play an integral, if not overlooked, role in everyday life.

“The cultural undercurrent of New York Textile Month has become increasingly important as we see a deeper interest in anthropology and artisanal craft emerging everywhere,” says Edelkoort. “Throughout interiors, we will continue to embrace textiles, from accessories to drapes, upholstery, and wall hangings. At a time when AI emerges as a threat to the handmade, loom textiles and industrial weaves become metaphors for the human imagination translated into a fluid piece of cloth.”

A central component of this year’s New York Textile Month is the “Fibration” group exhibition. Held at Chelsea’s L’SPACE Gallery through October 13, the show brings together format-defying works by American fiber artists Liz Collins, Joy Curtis, Melissa Dadourian, Regina Durante Jestrow, Courtney Puckett, Lelia Bacchi Curotto Levy, Michelle Segre, and Denise Treizman. Curated by fellow interdisciplinary textile talent Ragna Froda, the showcase reveals a wide range of unconventional sculptures and tapestries that place particular emphasis on how the medium increasingly intersects with fine art. Expect vibrant colors, visceral textures, and playful juxtapositions of unlikely materials.

10 Highlights from “Fibration” during New York Textile Month 

Broken Promise by Melissa Dadourian

By integrating found fabric scraps into cohesive yet texturally varied collages, Brooklyn- and Hudson Valley-based Melissa Dadourian’s abstract Wall Works seem to transcend definitions of 3-D sculpture and 2-D tapestry. The 2021 Broken Promises piece utilizes different geometric patterned fabrics that when placed together, create an almost trompe l’oeil effect.

Corner Grids by Melissa Dadourian

Dadourian’s more recent Corner Grids work, 2023, demonstrates how her career-defining preoccupation of combining disparate materials can be expressed in entirely different applications. In this instance, elements of open knit rather than tightly woven textiles are brought together in a cohesive interplay of color, texture, negative and positive space, and captivating jarring proportional composition.

Lamplighter by Courtney Puckett

Hudson Valley-based artist and educator Courtney Puckett often implements various wrapping, knitting, and weaving techniques to replicate the contours of everyday design objects that have been discarded. Found furnishings and household items are repurposed as armatures for her cumulative, human-sized works. Pieces like the wonderfully exaggerated Lamplighter, 2023, take on personified characteristics.

New Day by Courtney Puckett

Puckett’s earlier New Day work, 2020, has a more conceptual and universal connotation. The totemic sculpture emerges from a nondescript metal frame structure and is imbued with a wrapped mesh-like material structure that progressively moves between the different colors of the rainbow. The piece is both a demonstration of the artist’s mastery of her own bespoke techniques and aptitude in constructed composition.

Rise and Shine by Denise Treizman

As the title of this work might suggest, Chilean Israeli artist Denise Treizman shapes her practice around playfulness and critique in equal measure. She often coalesces found materials in abstracted multi-dimensional pieces that indirectly poke fun at rampant consumer culture. Bright colors and even unlikely materials like neon tubes are brought together to riff on commonplace imagery. Cast in blue and yellow hues, Rise and shine riffs on the over use of this expression.

Jazz by Liz Collins

Over the past decade, Liz Collins has emerged as a prominent figure in the fiber art and textile design worlds. From fashion to site-specific installations, the Brooklyn-based heavyweight has worked across innumerable mediums and applications. Collin’s Jazz tapestry, 2020, stems from her ongoing exploration of geometric patterns and herringbone motif lines. This piece, like many others, breaks the third wall so to speak, with 3-D acrylic and rayon fabric yarn threads emerging from the 2-D composition.

Olga Depicts this Kind of Life by Lelia Bacchi Curotto Levy

Pushing the definition of fiber arts even further to incorporate the age-old tradition of woven basketry, Lelia Bacchi Curotto Levy creates otherworldly sculptures. The Olga Depicts this Kind of Life piece, 2023, transforms materials like Cochineal and marigold-dyed rattan reeds into a multi-appendaged creature. The Brazilian talent is known to allow the materials she is working with to emerge as characters.

Meteor Voidsorption by Michelle Segre

Not unlike her exhibiting contemporaries, Michelle Segre blends otherwise seemingly disparate materials. Works like Meteor Voidsorption, 2022, combine metal, yarn, plaster, papier-mâché, plasticine, and paint. The almost talismanic work sees materials forming a controlled spider web over a curvilinear armature which plays host to an abstractly-painted textile. The drip effect one might associate with paint is expressed as a loose-end yarn threat that forms as a contour fringe.

Vulnerability & Resilience 2 by Regina Durante Jestrow

Miami-based artist Regina Durante Jestrow first forayed into quiltmaking as a way to stave off homesickness. Her practice—one that has morphed into something that is more experimental than conventional—now harnesses this age-old technique to evoke her reflections on American history and the recontextualizing of its vast array of craft traditions. Comprising ink, watercolor, acrylic paint, burnt muslin, second-hand shirting material, and thread, Vulnerability & Resilience 2 takes on a viscerally tense geometric composition. The almost haptic work includes what appears to be sharp cutaways loosely connected in what one might describe as a zipper formation.

Vulnerability & Resilience 12 by Regina Durante Jestrow

Stemming from a similar exploration, the Vulnerability & Resilience 12 work reveals Durante Jestrow’s dexterity when it comes to both technical skills and visual composition. More organic in nature, the graphical piece evokes the oscillation of emotional responses we all experience at times in a contrasting black and white configuration.

10 Questions With… James Hirschfeld of Paperless Post

James Hirschfeld founded Paperless Post with his sister, Alexa, in 2009, when he realized he needed a contemporary way to plan his 21st birthday party. Since then, the company has revolutionized the digital invitation market—and invited everyone to join in on the fun, from stationary experts, like Crane, to designers, like Jonathan Adler and Monique Lhuillier, not to mention Paddington Bear. Here, Hirschfeld sits down with Interior Design to talk skeumorphism, artificial intelligence, and a new collaboration with Milan-based textile brand Lisa Corti, celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.

Editor’s note: This conversation that has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Making Paperless Post with James Hirschfeld 

Interior Design: What’s the origin story of Paperless Post?

James Hirschfeld: It really was born out of a design vision. I was born in 1986, and in my lifetime, I saw communication become digitized. Everything moved from physical mail to digital mail, from my college acceptance letter to business email. But by the time I was 21, I saw that one kind of communication hadn’t really moved online: the communication around important life moments. Stationary was really big, but I saw that eventually it would probably move online, too. And digital media was in a kind of vacuum of design, with web 2.0 and Facebook and Twitter taking off. Everybody felt like the internet was about user-generated content and functionality. It was hard to create beautiful images in a browser, and it was harder to download beautiful images in that browser. There was just a pervasive feeling that the web was not a place for beauty.

ID: When did beauty first become important to you?

JH: As a young child, I was obsessed with collecting coins and stamps. It wasn’t about the history, or the regimes that were putting them out. It was about the images, the illustrations, the culture and aesthetics. I was in college when I was first starting Paperless Post, at Harvard, and I was in a club there where the walls were covered in, like, 200 years of posters created by amateur artists. The illustrations could communicate something as subtle as words but not with words, through color and gesture and line. At the time, most people didn’t have access to Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign. So I thought: Why don’t we make a platform where a normal consumer can go into the browser and design an invitation for an event that matters to them that’s actually really beautiful, that they feel proud of?

ID: What were the early design principals you developed?

JH: They were simple, and they were the aesthetics of print. Skeumorphic, which is probably a bit of a dirty word today. But I really wanted senders and receivers alike to have that feeling of when you go into your mailbox and there’s that one envelope that’s thick and has a nice hand-feel to it. The user experience that followed was based on the experience of customizing stationary: it was very textured, and there were typesetting tools. You could customize the inside and outside of the envelope. We didn’t use tons of color because even if you were doing an expensive letterpress process, you’d never have more than five colors on it. As we launched, people began to get the idea that this is not a webpage for your event, it’s not an evite. It’s an invitation you get through the internet. And once they got that, we were able to be a bit more expansive about the way we think about good design for the product.

ID: How so?

JH: At first, we followed stationary trends, where you were seeing a move toward full-color illustration. Then we opened up to start working with collaborators. But a big change was when we launched Flyer, which broke from skeumorphism and embraced digital aesthetics. It created a canvas for users to create something that wasn’t even necessarily beautiful, but was expressive and fun with gifs, photographs, and video. It embraced the aesthetic of the Internet and allowed users to remix it. The special part of the experience is having an event and saying: This is my party, and this is how I want you to see me.

ID: That makes me wonder: How do you know how many tools to give the user, and how complicated they should be?

JH: Well, the landscape of creativity tools has changed incredibly since we started. There were basically no browser-based design experiences, and now you can use the whole Adobe suite on your iPhone. And then there’s AI, which is wild and kind of mind-blowing in terms of the amount of possibilities in creating images. So all that has encouraged us to offer more and more tooling, and to create high-impact features that advanced users can use. But while it’s great when professional designers use us, we’re really thinking of  helping the average consumer make something they’re proud of, which means powerful tools but also really helpful defaults and settings, beautiful proprietary assets in fonts and illustrations that people can riff off.

ID: When did you first bring in collaborators?

JH: As I got into this world and began thinking about product, I had my own heroes. Kate and Andy Spade had an approach to stationary that was kind of whimsical but also postmodern and conceptual. They would, like, foil stamp Cheerios onto a birth announcement. That was really cool. Rebecca Schmidt Ruebensaal’s Mr. Boddington’s Studio had a great voice in stationary. I think other people might be like: Okay, that’s cool, how do we do our version of it? And I thought, I don’t really want to copy them. I want to work with them. And that’s how we started to collaborate.

ID: How did you begin working with interior designers?

JH: In the end, stationary is pretty simple, generally just a rectangular two-dimensional plane. We realized it would be fun to see how someone like Kelly Wearstler would do it, coming from a world where she’s thinking about environments. Another early collaborator was John Derian, and that was a fun stepping stone because his world is totally about paper. He goes around the world finding beauty in old paper and then reproducing and cutting it up to make new things. It was interesting to translate that to a digital product. We’ve done great collabs with interiors companies like Schumacher and Jonathan Adler. One of the nicest ways people experience their homes is when they’re entertaining, so this is kind of going a half-step from that, the way you present yourself as host and style your party. And that led to fashion companies like Oscar de la Renta. It was exciting to explore, from a partnership angle, designers who have great prints, or how to capture the essence of the cut or a drape of a dress.

ID: Which brings us to the new collaboration with Lisa Corti. How did that come about?

JH: A couple years ago, I was at my friend’s mother’s house in Bridgehampton [New York]. Her mother has incredible taste, and I look up to her a lot. Her kitchen is a very old-school kitchen, with a big round table, and on the table was the most cool tablecloth I’ve ever seen. It was mustardy yellow with this deep burgundy stripe and had a flower in the middle of it. Clearly, it was block printed, and it just really stuck with me. It’s a look at, once you see it, you kind of know it when you see it, and I started to see them at different people’s houses and began learning about the brand.

A few years ago, I wanted to do a summertime launch of a collection that would speak to a kind of Mediterranean, outdoor living experience. Tablecloths kind of look like invitations in the sense that they’re rectangles with incredible graphics on them, so I thought it was easy to see how this could work. I love how everything they do is hand block-printed. You never see a flat color; you can see where the repeat is, and where the distribution of the dye is uneven. It was important to me that it came through, even in thumbnail sizes.

ID: Was that kind of bold patterning what inspired the collaboration with Duro Olowu?

JH: He’s an amazing fashion designer and works a lot with referencing textile traditions. As a curator, he brought such a vision to the pattern and color, but he was also so delighted to see the ways our team reworked them and integrated text in creative ways. I think it’s a magical moment in collaboration when a tablecloth becomes an invitation—when a text gets integrated into the design. That’s always really fun to be on the phone call when the designer says: Wait a second, I would never have thought to do the graphic design that way.

ID: What’s next for Paperless Post?

JH: I’m very interested in figuring out how to best incorporate AI into the product on many different levels. On the design side, I think it could be an empowering for people to edit and create something that is really just for them, and is coming out of their own vision. I’m very much looking into how embrace that as part of our toolset. And we’ve also decided to create a product that is tailored to the needs of people having events at work, which has been interesting on the design side. Businesses have to operate within their own brand guidelines and they sometimes want to be polished, but not too expressive. So how do you create exceptional design for them? It’s interesting, because Paperless Post is a technology company serving hundreds of millions of users. But, at its core, it’s a design company.

More Invitations by Paperless Post 

This 16-Piece Residential Window-Treatment Line Packs a Punch

An Exhibit Unravels the Significance of Wool in Oslo, Norway

Liz Lambert’s New Outdoor Textiles Serve Up Southwestern Style

• 

• 

Fiber Artist Windy Chien Knots Her Way into Fine Jewelry

Sailors use ringbolt hitches, so does Windy Chien. But she uses the knotting technique to craft site-specific, room-size installations for such clients as Google and Nobu Hotels. Now, the artist and author switches mediums to precious metals, translating the aesthetics of her fiber works into Knot Life, an eight-piece collection of wearable art developed with fine jeweler Cast, launching this month. “My goal is to elevate the humble object into one of awe and beauty,” Chien explains. Stunning indeed. Among the standouts are the Woven Mesh Pendants, necklaces consisting of a 1.4-inch-diameter ring of charcoal jade—the material chosen for its protective qualities—sheathed in sterling-silver or 14-karat gold mesh. A smaller pendant, earrings, and a ring complete the series.

PrevNext

• 

• 

• 

• 

Nordic Knots and Giancarlo Valle Cocreate New Rug Collection

Rafael de Cárdenas Designs a New Collection for MG + BW

Claudy Jongstra: 2022 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee

Dissatisfaction with working in the fashion industry was a major career catalyst for Dutch textile designer and artist Claudy Jongstra. “We had to produce eight collections a year so there was no time for refinement or aesthetics, it was just machinery, production,” she recalls. The endless turnover in fabrics made her unhappy, too. What she had loved about fashion as a little girl, whose mother made the family’s wardrobe out of “beautiful fabrics,” and as a young woman studying fashion design at the Utrecht School of the Arts, was the freedom it provided. “By making your own clothes, you develop your own identity and individuality, and it gives you a feeling of independence.”

Claudy Jongstra Discovers a Passion for Textiles

Visiting a 1994 exhibition at the TextielMuseum in Tilburg, Jongstra was bowled over by a traditional nomadic yurt. “It was literally a house made of felted wool,” she says, still sounding excited so many years later. She quit her fashion job, got work cleaning offices in the evenings and, locked up in her Amsterdam atelier, devoted herself “to finding out everything possible about this material.” Two years later she showed the results of her labors to the curator of that exhibition. “She immediately purchased four pieces for the museum collection,” Jongstra says. “That’s when I thought, Okay then, this is really the path I have to go down.” So Jongstra spent the rest of the decade creating innovative felted materials that spanned the categories of art, craft, and fashion. John Galliano, Donna Karan, and Christian Lacroix used them in their clothing designs, and the Jedi knights in Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace wore coats made of her felt.

In 2001, wanting to work on large-scale pieces and control all stages of the production process, including growing her own wool, cultivating plants for natural dyes, and following sustainable artisanal practices, Jongstra moved her business to rural Friesland in the northern Netherlands. There, she not only set up a design studio and atelier—and began earning public commissions from such heavyweight firms as Deborah Berke Partners, Gensler, Reddymade, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects—but also established a flock of Drenthe Heath sheep, an ancient breed that lives on heathland, “maintaining it in a very natural way,” she explains. “Their quiet life is reflected in the quality of the wool—it’s shiny and has long fibers, you can see it’s healthy and vital.”

The same could be said for the plants Jongstra and her team grow for dyeing the wool and other fibers she then felts. Frustrated by the toxic pesticides and chemicals used in commercial vegetable-based pigments, which also cause variations in color quality, she created her own biodynamic botanical garden to propagate heritage plants. Over the years she has recreated ancient recipes for many hues, including centuries-old Burgundian black—a warm, complex shade incorporating walnut, indigo, woad, and madder root dyes—which was showcased in Viktor & Rolf’s 2019 haute-couture felted-wool collection. She has also revived a distinctive red Rembrandt used, which is made from madder root. “It takes three years to grow and two to dry before it’s ready,” she says. “But it’s worth the wait because you get a top-quality product.”

Today, Jongstra’s enterprise spreads across two sites, not far from one another. The first centers on agriculture, with a farm, bakery, garden, and greenhouse; it’s here that the dye plants are grown. The other location, where the emphasis is on craftsmaking and research, is a compound of mostly cottagelike buildings housing the atelier, design studio, dye workshop, accommodations for four interns, and Jongstra’s own home. The newest addition is a modern building acquired from the neighboring carpenter. It has been renovated with recycled materials as a place of learning, sharing, and experimentation that Jongstra calls Loads, in the sense of filling up or enriching. While not a school, per se, Loads is dedicated to “transferring ancient knowledge to the younger generations,” she notes, the art and craft of “weaving, spinning, making, slowness, all related to wool, of course.” It runs a four-day workshop tantalizingly named Farm to Fiber to Fashion.

In the same knowledge-sharing vein, Jongstra has started to collaborate with farmers in Spain who want to transition to alternative crops such as flax, hemp, and plants for natural dyes. “The traditional farm is not the farm it was,” she observes. “It is a place where people can meet—scientists, designers, artists, co-creators—and that the farmer can diversify and have an impact on biodiversity.” This is more than savvy agricultural management. “Understanding the cycles of nature and developing holistic processes helps you feel less alienated,” Jongstra believes, so this ethos becomes an antidote to a world that she regards as having become too complex.

Does wool still hold surprises for Jongstra? “It’s a lifelong journey, with lots of side roads,” she says with a smile. One such byway has led her to explore what can be done with all the waste produced by the wool industry. “In the Netherlands alone some 1.5 million kilos of wool are burned annually because we don’t value it and because shipping to Asia is too expensive,” she says. Over the past three years, she has developed an industrial woven textile made from wool waste—incidentally her first foray into weaving—which is produced in the northern Netherlands from yarns spun in Donegal, Ireland, because there are no Dutch spinning factories anymore. Jongstra and Stefan Koper have established an initiative called Weved, which collaborates with designers on creating products using the textile. It has already partnered with the social design brand Re-gained and Studio Floris Schoonderbeek, both of which launched new pieces of furniture incorporating the fabric at this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan. And to think the journey started with a humble yurt.

The Work of Claudy Jongstra Studio On Display Around the World