statements

Yuko Takada

For me tracing paper represents the fine line between dream and reality

Chiyoko Tanaka

Many of my pieces, once woven by hand, are laid down outdoors on the ground, or on a rock. I then rub them over and over again, carefully, with a selected stone or a brick. I just want to touch the earth through this process, and to trace the texture of the ground. For these works I have coined the phrase Grinded Fabric.

Masaklazu Kabayashi

When I held a single thread loosely between my hands, I noticed that it formed a beautiful, natural line. For the next ten years I explored this idea.

This work was created to highlight a single strand of thread. A bamboo-leaf boat floats down a river on a jet-black night. A glance reveals a crescent moon peeping out from behind the clouds

Naomi Kobayashi

I am intimately aware of the rhythms and cycles of nature, sometimes powerful, at other times delicate. The circles I have been presenting for several years symbolise the cosmos

Machiko Agano

I am attracted by the mysterious shapes of nature: patters made by the wind on desert sands; shapes on eroded rocks on coastal shores; clouds driven across the autumn sky. While these natural patterns serve perhaps no purpose, nevertheless I feel drawn to the power of an invisible and all-encompassing force of which I am part.

Machiko Agano

The limestone cave, and unconscious memories of the womb…Once you retrace both their histories, you are guided back to a primordial age that ewe once knew intimately.

Mitsuo Toyazaki

I am interested in our everyday, ordinary senses. Of particular interest are people’s thoughts in regard to clothing. What is it about clothing that creates anxiety? The question is linked to the objectives behind my work, and in particular to the consideration of two motifs: decoration and symbols.

Chiyu Uemae

What is so special about art created through stitching is that the thread itself posses both light and darkness, and the dark background cloth is visible even in the densely stitched areas, so the surface of the work is very subtle in terms of colour.

Ann Hamilton

My first hand is a sewing hand

Like human skin (cloth) is a membrane that divides an exterior from an exterior. It both reveals and conceals.

Interiors are also exteriors

the ‘quilting bee’ aspect doesn’t really matter…I’m interested in the accretion of small gestures, in the way we build the world with them.

Caroline Broadhead

I am interested in the idea of a negative double of the body, the insubstantial mirror image, the inescapable other…..I wanted to use the shadow as an illuminating element, with a reflective fabric cut to the cast shadow, and here revealing the lining, the inside of a dress. The small scale of these pieces gave them a simultaneously sweet and sinister feel, reflecting the various meanings of shadows.

Anne Wilson

My objects and installations explore the themes of time, loss, private and social rituals. The work draws upon culturally constructed meanings (coded women’s work, art historical conventions), conceptual processes and perception. I use predominantly the materials of hair and cloth and labour (hand stitching) associated with the domestic work place……. The visceral nature of human hair is in contrast to the formality of white linen and sets up an aesthetic oppositional tendencies

Michael Brennan-Wood

I’ve been interested in microphotography since I was a student…it’s almost an inner landscape, or cellular landscape.

I looked at one of the lace designs closely and it reminded me of skin.

Towards the end of the 80’s I was beginning to get very interested in textile history and to question the derisory way in which decoration and pattern were written and talked about.

I like the idea of a genealogy, of being part of the history of textiles. It makes me feel rooted in a tradition

Yinka Shonibare

I am actually producing something perceived as ethnic in inverted commas, but at the same time the African Fabric used in my work is something industrially produced and given its cultural origins, my own authenticity is questioned.

Eva Hesse

It is the most ridiculous structure that I have ever made and that is why it is really good. It has the kind of depth I don’t always achieve and that is the kind of depth or soul or absurdity or life or meaning or feeling or intellect that I want to get.

Christian Boltanski

Second-hand clothes speak of someone who was here but is no longer here. The smell and the creases have remained, but not the person. Pieces with clothes are more difficult…one thinks of the Holocaust. I always try to use modern clothes so that they can be recognised as things of today.

Joseph Beuys

I don’t believe that an Art School… should lay emphasis on fixed places of work. That sort of thinking is tied up with the idea of art as a craft, with the work bench and the drawing table.