Homespun textiles of an avant-garde nature
Recycling as an art form or expression of environmental awareness is something that we all should take personally. We now live in an era of heightened awareness about the need to reduce household waste and reprogram our consumption, but the ability to creatively visualize the transformation of cast-off objects and materials is, in my opinion, critical to adopting a truly sustainable plan of action.
As an environmental textile artist, writer, and mother of twins, I am someone who scrutinizes the flow of goods through my home on a perpetual basis. I also live between New York City, Eastern Europe, and a farm in rural Italy, so my life needs to be one that demonstrates a responsible assessment of precious resources, materials, and genuine community involvement given my life in different locales.
Textiles have been a part of my life since my childhood on our family farm in New York State’s Hudson River Valley. My mother taught me how to cultivate high quality wool as well as spin fleece into lustrous yarn for knitting and weaving. Evenings at home were spent carding washed wool or winding skeins of yarn in front of the cast iron wood stove. I chose to live in a major urban center after graduating from university, but this ingrained love for slow processes and handcrafting techniques is something that I now carry with me, no matter where I roam.
For me, sourcing sustainably is a function of weaving and integrating local materials into my artwork wherever I am stationed. For example, when in Bulgaria, I tend to craft with recycled laces, scrap textiles, and natural fiber that I discover while visiting villages dotting the countryside. In Manhattan I comb the sidewalks of the city looking for what I call ‘fiber flotsam’ or loose debris to be knotted, twined, or crocheted into handmade ‘fiber forms’ that I create in the studio. For me recycling is an expression of the varied texture and regenerative qualities of my surroundings, not a limiting or onerous activity.
Artist Alyce Santoro is someone who shares this spirit of resourcefulness. Her Sonic Fabric featured on Source4Style artfully re-invents the ready-made materials that are very much a part of the creative realm she inhabits. Woven from 50% recorded audiocassette tape and 50% polyester thread, the lustrous weave of this fabric is audible when a tape head is drawn over its shimmering surface. As the artist describes, “Every batch of Sonic Fabric is recorded with an intricate collage of sound prior to weaving. The fabric is then woven at a family-run textile mill in New England.” As a means to further the storytelling aspect of this ingenuous textile, recordings of the music woven into the fabric are also available to listen to as yet another layer of the user experience.
In a recent chat with Alyce she relayed a bit of background history on the project, “When I first began weaving with tape (eleven or so years ago), I do not think that the perilous state of the environment was as much a part of mainstream consciousness as it is now. There was much less emphasis on the importance of recycling and reusing materials. Now, all these years later, the idea that resources are precious and limited translates to a need to find more sustainable ways of problem solving, and thankfully, this very activity has become fashionable.”
The fact that designers now have access to fabric embedded with sound functionality as well as artistic properties is one that is very forward thinking in my opinion. Of course we want our fabrics to last longer, demonstrate versatility and a life cycle that pushes the frontier of sustainability, but the possibility that we might also be able to design multi-sensory creations and beauty out of reclaimed audiocassette tape is a performance coup.
There is definitely a trend towards avant-garde recycling combined with homespun crafting in contemporary fashion and interior design. I was reminded of this while viewing the Knoll textile survey exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Knoll 1945-2010 provides a historic timeline of the individuals and ideas that helped shape Knoll from its early days through 2010. The exhibit’s curators aimed to highlight the “sartorial dimension” of the Knoll brand and the under-recognized role of textiles in the history of modern interiors and design. I was particularly impressed with an innovative textile called, “Nylon Homespun,”created by Swiss designer, Suzanne Huguenin. This highly durable, nubbed fabric became a classic choice for some of the most stylish modern design showcases, and also introduced the notion that high performance fabrics could have an aesthetically pleasing and tactile edge.
As someone who gravitates towards using natural fiber in her sculptural work, I am increasingly drawn to the sustainable stories behind recycled textile blends and responsibly made synthetics. The reclaimed materials incorporated into the manufacturing of these fabrics constitute a notable percentage of products from our household and textile waste stream. A responsible mission is a must, but an ability to work with what make sense in one’s environment, for one’s collection, or even for one’s home and hearth, is something that we might try to further adopt as a way to bridge the past and the future, as well as the homespun with the technological. ♥
