Spinexpo, Paris 2018

Woven and Knitted textile design students all report having a truly inspirational and engaging experience at Spinexpo, Paris. Presenting their work, networking and supporting the Spinexpo team were just few things the students experienced. Here’s an edited selection of what the student’s thought.

Contributions from Amy Halley, Emily Johnson, Amy Osgood, Amber Davis and Aimee Dye

    

Spinexpo Paris, known for featuring cutting edge technologies and having the highest technical expertise, was a great way for us to exhibit our work professionally, understand how a show of this scale works and to see how designers work with spinners to showcase yarns and their versatility. It was also an extremely valuable experience to speak to different companies including yarn producers and garment manufacturers. For example, from Wanziman Hong Kong Limited we learnt about an interesting new technology which imitates woven patterns into knitted fabric to create a unique material which has qualities of both knit and weave.

Yarn suppliers also exhibited new technologies, combinations of fibres and innovations including eco-friendly products, tape yarns, metallic textures, woollen yarns and paper qualities; the sheer volume of possibilities was eye opening.

   

Each stand was exciting and enticing, each seller had many potential buyers viewing their sample racks. It is perhaps easiest to envisage the buyers as children visiting a sweet shop for the first time; completely animated and engrossed in the products.

The Spinexpo team were extremely kind and encouraging to us. They made us feel a part of the family and become involved in every aspect of the show. A most wonderful experience, which has been invaluable.

Eduardo Paolozzi at the Whitechapel Gallery

16 February – 14 May 2017

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Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was one of the most innovative and irreverent artists of the 20th century. Considered the ‘godfather of Pop Art’, his collages, sculptures and prints challenged artistic convention, from the 1950s through to the Swinging Sixties and advent of ‘Cool Britannia’ in the 1990s.

This major Eduardo Paolozzi retrospective spans five decades and features over 250 works; from the artist’s post-War bronzes, revolutionary screen-prints and collages, to his bold textiles and fashion designs.

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Robert Rauschenberg Exhibition at Tate Modern

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Robert Rauschenberg blazed a new trail for art in the second half of the twentieth century.

 

This landmark exhibition celebrates his extraordinary six-decade career, taking you on a dazzling adventure through modern art in the company of a truly remarkable artist.

From paintings including flashing lights to a stuffed angora goat, Rauschenberg’s appetite for incorporating things he found in the streets of New York knew no limits. Pop art silkscreen paintings of Kennedy sit alongside 1000 gallons of bentonite mud bubbling to its own rhythm. Rauschenberg even made a drawing which was sent to the moon.

Each room captures a different moment of this rich journey, from Rauschenberg’s early response to abstract expressionism to his final works saturated in images and colour. Seen together they show how Rauschenberg rethought the possibilities for art in our time.

This exhibition, organised in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is the first full-scale retrospective since the artist’s death in 2008 and the ultimate Rauschenberg experience. It is your one chance to see these major international loans together in one place, while discovering the full story of an inspirational and much-loved artist whose influence is still felt today.

The exhibition runs until 2 April 2017

For more details http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/robert-rauschenberg

London Transport Museum: Weaving Futures In The Studio

Between now and February 2017, London Transport Musuem are hosting  Weaving Futures In The Studio, part of their year-long public programme of events, and situated in the ‘pop-up’ designer’s Studio integrated into LTM’s temporary Designology exhibition.  It is a three-month focus on digital jacquard woven textile design and moquette concepts, exploring process and making, and is curated in partnership with research and design industry experts Philippa Brock and Samuel Plant Dempsey.

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Weaving Futures explores the importance and potential of woven textiles to the London Transport System and features a state of the art TC2 digital jacquard loom. The idea is to actively explore how good design makes life in London better, through residencies and participatory workshops. The work does not exist currently and as the exhibition progresses this will be made and then displayed. It also examines the process of designing for and production of woven textiles.

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Each week there are different weave designers, researchers, artists and industry designers resident in the studio, with each resident responding to the same design brief, relating to data and transport. The residents will be working with Studio weavers, Rosie Green and Hanna Vinlöf–Nylen, to realise their final design on the digital loom. Outcomes and final designs will be displayed in the Studio and shared during the Museum’s Late Debate and Friday Late events.

Residents: Assemble, Beatwoven, Philippa Brock, Camira, Central Saint Martins, BA Textile students, Samuel Dempsey, Linda Florence, Gainsborough Weaving Company, Eleanor Pritchard, Rare Thread (aka Kirsty McDougall and Laura Miles), Josephine OrtegaIsmini Samanidou, Studio Houndstooth, Takram & Priti Veja

Drop into London Transport Museum’s pop-up Studio for a unique behind the scenes chance to experience contemporary transport design innovation through a year-long programme of events. The studio is open to the general public and one entry ticket gets you in for a year. The programme is part of this exciting Designology exhibition and includes:

·      one-day workshops with London’s best known transport designers

·      design residencies, briefs and challenges

·      intellectual late debates, workshops and talks

The workshop programme includes among others:

25, 26, 30 January 2017 – Research Collaboration with Brock, Dempsey and Veja – Designers Philippa Brock, Samuel Plant Dempsey & Dr. Priti Veja will be coming together in the studio to work collaboratively on a brief, combining their expertise in design thinking, with Brock on 3D woven jacquard and haptics, Dempsey on product design and 3D printing, and Veja on woven e-textiles. Find out how electronics can be constructed in woven structures to make integrated soft circuits, wearable technology and smart textiles. philippabrock.com I design-plant.co.uk I weft-lab.com

9,10 February 2017 – Weaving Music with BeatWoven®  – Meet award winning, avant-garde textiles label BeatWoven® and find out how they use songs and sounds to visualise and orchestrate pattern formations in textile design, particularly through the technique of weaving. Watch live as they work with our weavers to interpret a brief on the Digital Loom. beatwoven.co.uk

17, 18 February – Upholster and Accessorise with Eleanor Pritchard – Meet hands-on London weave studio; Eleanor Pritchard (Texprint alumna), designers and manufactures of upholstery and interior accessories. Find out about using geometrics and graphic reversible patterns to create clean, contemporary design and observe their approach to our transport brief. eleanorpritchard.com

For more information go to http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk

Now open at the Barbican – The Vulgar – Fashion Redefined

13 October 2016 – 5 February 2017

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Potent, provocative and sometimes shocking, the word vulgar conjures up strong images, ideas and feelings in us all. The Vulgar is the first exhibition to explore the inherently challenging but utterly compelling territory of taste in fashion, from the renaissance through to contemporary design. Examining the constantly evolving notion of vulgarity in fashion whilst revelling in its excesses, you are invited to think again about exactly what makes something vulgar and why it is such a sensitive and contested term.

Drawn from major public and private collections worldwide, The Vulgar showcases over 120 stunning objects, ranging from historical costumes to couture and ready-to-wear looks, with contributions from leading contemporary designers such as Walter van BeirendonckChloéChristian DiorPam HoggCharles JamesChristian LacroixLanvinMoschinoMiuccia PradaAgent ProvocateurElsa SchiaparelliPhilip TreacyUNDERCOVERViktor & RolfLouis Vuitton and Vivienne Westwood.

http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?id=18736

Love Thy Denim at Winchester Discovery Centre

27 August – 23 October 

An impressive costume exhibition exploring the origins and versatility of denim, from its workwear heritage, to becoming the fabric of our everyday lives. From the ‘Wild West’ to Vivienne Westwood, mass production jeans to handcrafted spectacles, we present the many faces of our beloved denim.

Free entry

In conjunction with the exhibition is Love Thy Denim lecture: Heritage and Renaissance

Thursday 20th October 2016 – 7.30pm

Winchester Discovery Centre

A lively lecture by Mohsin Sajid, the UK’s denim aficionado and owner of label Endrime. This fascinating talk, for denim enthusiasts and aspiring designers, will detail the history of the cloth and origins of jeans.

Mohsin brings his unique perspective as a designer and consultant to major denim brands and discusses the emergence of a denim renaissance in Britain and beyond.

Price: £5.00 per person

William Eggleston Portraits

National Portrait Gallery – 21 July – 23 October 2016

William Eggleston Portraits

William Eggleston is a pioneering American photographer renowned for his vivid, poetic and mysterious images. This exhibition of 100 works surveys Eggleston’s full career from the 1960s to the present day and is the most comprehensive display of his portrait photography ever.

Eggleston is celebrated for his experimental use of colour and his solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976 is considered a pivotal moment in the recognition of colour photography as a contemporary art form. Highlights of the exhibition will include monumental prints of two legendary photographs first seen forty years ago: the artist’s uncle Adyn Schuyler Senior with his assistant Jasper Staples in Cassidy Bayou, Mississippi, and Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi.

Also on display will be a selection of never-before seen vintage black and white prints from the 1960s. Featuring people in diners, petrol stations and markets in and around the artist’s home in Memphis, Tennessee, they help illustrate Eggleston’s unique view of the world.

Made You Look at The Photographers’ Gallery

MADE YOU LOOK / Dandyism and Black Masculinity

15 Jul – 25 Sep 2016 at The Photographers’ Gallery

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From studio portraiture to street photography, this exhibition brings together a group of geographically and historically diverse photographers whose imagery explores black masculinity as performance, as play, as invention – in particular through the adoption of a dandy-esque persona.

In the early 21st century, black men are among the most influential trendsetters in fashion, music and global style culture. Yet high visibility for black men is matched by high vulnerability – as illustrated by disproportionate rates of arrest and incarceration for black men in the UK and USA.

Made You Look explores dandyism as radical personal politics, a willed flamboyance that flies in the face of conventional constructions of the black masculine. It proposes that the black ‘dandy’, with his extravagant emphasis on dress foregrounds a hyper-visible identity which counters the heighted vulnerability, the result of a charged history of objectification. In the context of this exhibition, dandyism isn’t simply about sharp dressing but rather, consciously problematising ideas of male identity through dress or deportment that is arresting, provocative, louche, camp and gloriously assertive.

Making & Unmaking: An exhibition curated by Duro Olowu

19 June – 18 September 2016 at The Camden Arts Centre

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Making & Unmaking, curated by Duro Olowu (b. 1965, Lagos), is the latest in our series of artist-selected shows. Duro Olowu is a celebrated fashion designer whose bold innovations with pattern, colour and shape reveal his early influences living between Nigeria and Europe, and his ongoing fascination with the world. His fluency with diverse aesthetics can be seen in the clothes he makes as well as the exhibitions he has curated, which combine antique textiles with his own fabric designs, bringing together discordant colours and patterns alongside disparate cultural forms.

Filling all three galleries, the Central Space, Reading Room and Garden, this exhibition draws together over 70 artists from around the world spanning this century and the last, including 19th century textiles made by unknown hands. Individually, each work has a story to tell; collectively, they begin a conversation in which visual, narrative and thematic relationships unfold. This eclectic collage of works, some of which have strong political undercurrents, addresses issues surrounding cultural identity, sexuality and the representation of the body. Olowu’s exhibition invites a multifaceted journey of encounters with the intuition, skill and vision of the artists represented within it.

Missoni Art Colour at the Fashion and Textile Museum

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Explore the creative process of Italian fashion house Missoni and the textiles of Ottavio and Rosita Missoni in the context of 20th century fine art. One of the most respected exponents of the ‘Made in Italy’ concept, the work of Ottavio and Rosita Missoni is deeply rooted in modern art making the Missoni brand distinctive in the world of international fashion.

MISSONI ART COLOUR showcases over 60 years of fashion alongside paintings by leading 20th century European artists, and previously unseen textile studies, paintings and Arazzi by Ottavio Missoni. The personal artwork of Missoni is mixed with modernist masterpieces, including the work of Sonia Delaunay, Lucio Fontana and Gino Severini, that have influenced Ottavio and Rosita in the development of their signature graphic style. These works are drawn from the MA*GA Art Museum, Gallarate and from private collections in Italy, and the majority have never been exhibited in the UK. The selection of fashion looks, designed by Angela Missoni since 1997, is drawn from the company’s archive, starting in 1953 to the present day.

Organised by the MA*GA Art Museum in collaboration with Missoni, the exhibition celebrates a family firm that has become an international success by combining craft expertise, materials and the latest design trends. Merino wool is featured in many of the garments on display, showcasing the heritage and cultural history of the Missoni family’s association with wool.

For details about visiting go here