Plants, flowers, gardens, insects and birds are a rich source of inspiration for artists and designers of all kinds. This beautiful guide demonstrates how to get the most out of your surroundings to create original and unique pieces in textiles.
Beginning with a chapter on drawing from nature, the book demonstrates how to use sketchbooks and create mood boards to explore your local environment and landscape. The author demonstrates how to make small pieces such as folding books based on observational drawing and stitch. Moving on to a section on floral inspiration, the author shows how to use plants and flowers in your work, from using stencilled flower motifs as embellishment to printing with plants onto fabric and making simple relief prints. Finally, the Taking Flight chapter demonstrates how to move into three-dimensions and sculptural work with birds and insects made from cloth.
Featuring step-by-step projects as well as work from contemporary artists, makers and collaborative groups throughout, this practical and beautiful guide shows how practitioners of all kinds can draw from the natural world for making and inspiration.
At 128 pages, and stacked with full colour photos of work by such artists as: Meredith Woolnough, Cas Holmes, Carol Naylor, Kim Thittichai, Alice Fox, Hillary Fayle, and many more, this is a great book for anyone who has an interest in connecting nature with textiles, and would be a great source book and constant reference guide for any textile artists library.
Textile Nature, along with Anne's previous book in collaboration with Cas Holmes Connected Cloth: Creating Collaborative Textile Projects, can both be bought on Amazon, as well as other reputable outlets.
Anne Kelly is a textile artist and tutor. She trained in Canada and the UK and now teaches and speaks to guilds and groups. Her work is exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, including private collections in the UK and abroad, the Vatican Collection in Rome and at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto. She was recently artist-in-residence at Sussex Prairies Garden in West Sussex and exhibited at the international World of Threads Festival and the Prague Patchwork Meeting. She is the co-author of Connected Cloth, also published by Batsford.
4 comments:
I enjoyed this post very much and thank you for the introduction to Anne Kelly.
Please do know that I continue to visit your posts, but don't always find time to leave a comment.
Best wishes.
John
I think you are spot on in saying that plants, flowers, gardens, insects and birds are a rich source of inspiration for artists and designers of all kinds. Since the heavy handed Victorian decorative tastes, most families have preferred light-filled, fresh, natural and relaxing taste in their homes. But nature can be more easily replicated with sun, sea, sand and flora than it can with insects, flowers, animals and birds, at least for family homes.
Thus the book will need to show how artists can draw on the natural world, while still being appealing to their eventual consumers.
Thank you John - just spotted this :)
Thanks all for your comments, they are all most welcome. Anne has produced such an excellent book, and I think a plus for any bookshelf.
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