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Colour, form & composition - The Open College of the Arts

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Colour, form & composition

Textile artists use a visual language of form, line and colour to create compositions that dont necessarily take inspiration from literal references. In this article you will find four exciting artists where colour, form and composition take an important place within their work.

Sarah Symes

Alongside her career in graphics, Sarah Symes began to invest more personal time into fabric art. It offered a perfect counter balance to the digital precision of working at a computer screen.
She aspires to recreate an internal experience of places and people through her work. It represents an abstraction of real life, infused with memories and ideas evoked by the subject. she tries to conjure emotion through colour and manipulate composition to suggest familiar forms and landscapes.
Her unique self-discovered process is the result of many years developing skills and techniques with fabric. Each piece begins as a sketched idea. She selects quality fabrics and carefully wash and hand dye them as needed. The fabric is then cut into shapes and stitched together using a sewing machine. It’s an improvised process, like painting or collage, enabling the gradual build up of colour and texture.

Josefina Concha

This artist is interested in the connection between process and material, and the way this relates to image and form in space. Using elements of  nature – skin, hair, plants and animals- is the initial inspiration of her work. How she transforms the underlying material with thread, is where the tension in her work is born.
The handmade and delicate quality of thread, is what attracts Josefina Concha to this material. By exploring these qualities she has found a medium that allows her to find new ways of painting and drawing without relying on those traditions. When sewing, she looks to transform the material into something new and unique. She tries to create gestures that go from the synthesis of the line to the saturation of the matter. Josefina Concha considers the expressiveness of the mark and definition of the image, to make the work more evocative.
The building of her work is articulated through the investment of thread on a piece of fabric, and the time dedicated to sewing it. This is made visible by the superimposition of layered lines that generate thickness and a sensation of volume – acknowledging  the structure of the underlying fabric through a conscious restructuring of it, through sewing.

Lisa Call

Adventure and connection are the underlying themes in all of Lisa Call artwork be it abstract, a landscape or about a place. She creates bold geometric shapes and compositions. She also hand dyes the fabrics that she uses, working with vibrant and rich shades which she then uses to compose her abstract textile pieces.
Her inspiration comes from a range of sources, including her fascination with repetition, pattern, and colours that lends itself naturally to abstraction. But elements of her art are also strongly influenced by man-made constructions and the geological forms of South America.

Emily Felderman

Textile artist, Emily Felderman, works with colour, stitching antiquities. Amongst her most representative pieces are antique scissor series. Sumptuous embroidery and antique scissors. She connects with antique objects, aspiring to making them ‘live’ again.
Her work has many stories to tell; she uses these objects in new ways and wonders what they were used for before she found them? Stitching? Cutting papers? Utilitarian? Bonsai?
They are now part of a complete art piece where their patina, scratches, and history are integrated and unified with her textile work.

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Posted by author: Pere Bruach

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