Maiwa Podcasts Maiwa

Like all great arts, textiles recreate our visiton of the world. We hold them up as exemplars of skill, ingenuity, creativity, and ambition. Textiles are poetic metaphors woven from ideas just as much as they are physical items woven from fibres.

Joy Boutrup is a textile engineer, chemist, and historian from Denmark. Catharine Ellis is a textile artist from North Carolina who specializes in combining weaving and dyeing. They first met at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. They have worked and taught collaboratively for many years.

In this lecture Amy Putansu will discuss how notions of spirituality have influenced her own hand-woven artwork. Inspired by Buddhism, Zen design precepts, and the minimalist art movement, Amy presents a powerful way to reimagine textiles as an invitation to the divine.

Traditional ajrakh block printing is one of the most iconic crafts to survive into the twenty-first century. But ajrahk, as practiced by the Khatris of the Kachchh Desert, has done much more than just survive; it has flourished and expanded to become a craft with a keen sense of tradition and a vision for how this tradition can be taken into the future by a new generation of ajrakh artisans.

Aya Matsunaga is a Japanese textile artist who tempered her formal studies by moving to Nottingham, England and embracing the UK fibre art scene of the 1990s.

When leading natural dye expert Michel Garcia goes into a garden, what does he see? He sees botanical strategies for survival that often give new insights into dye procedures and methods.