I visited this exhibition at Tent after meeting one of the makers, Ismini Samanidou, at Origin. She is a weaver and worked with wood carver Gary Allson on wooden wall panels digitally carved with an outsized twill weave pattern.
Actually Gary does other stuff but the emphasis here was on wood – his bowls are fabulous to handle – Ismini was minding his stand. I’ve got a bit of a thing about wood at the moment, maybe because, as any textile person, I look with my hands. As I didn’t take any photos from the stand please visit his site www.garyallson.co.uk to see what I’m talking about.
Another piece I liked was by Nina Tolstrup using fallen forest branches and digitally scanned and manipulated sections which were then traditionally cast to use as connectors, thus producing a stable and useable pair of trestles.
“Shine” by Geoffrey Mann explores how a laser scanner “sees” both the object and the reflection as the same thing and cannot tell the difference when scanning a shiny metallic object, in this case a Victorian candelabra. The spikes represent the intensity of the reflection, bringing a different viewpoint to our perception of technology.
And lastly, as I’m textile trained, I had to include a textile maker: Melanie Bowles, whose digitally manipulated prints were based on traditional shibori techniques of folding, knotting and dyeing.
There were, of course, other makers involved in the show – this is a snapshot as usual.
As ever, please contact me for further information.
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