Ise-Katagami is the Japanese craft of making paper stencils for dyeing textiles. The prefix Ise is used so not confuse the name with a city in the Akita prefecture in Northern Japan. I found out the difference whilst attending the opening yesterday of a unique exhibition curated by Dr Alice Humphries for ULITA (University of Leeds International Textile Archive). This gem for textile enthusiasts and researchers alike, ULITA is found in a converted chapel just outside the main Leeds University campus but attached (usefully) to the University Business School. I say usefully because the Archive wa ..read more

Tapestry is a curious form of artistic expression. It is constructed textile whose origins lie in a dim and distant past and whose present continues to evolve. Once a valued accompaniment to personal wealth and courtly prestige it adorned both public and private spaces, a backdrop of Arcadian scenes or a visual record of historic events displayed at a scale that was at one with the architectural wall: it covered the grimness and often greyness of stone with colour and shape. As most of us live our lives on smaller scales and with the incessant movement and colour on the flat screen t ..read more

My practice cannot be defined by a sole discipline. This statement is not only that of artist Cos Ahmet but comes close to what the recent winner of the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture Helen Marten suggests about her work. It’s a combination of collage, printmaking and textiles, and by what he’s showing at this years Knitting and Stitching Shows it is pretty much all 3-dimensional. He may be a member of the British Tapestry Group and recipient of the Theo Moorman grant, but his work is (to quote another tapestry artist in a different place Jilly Edwards) decidedly not ‘woolly pictures on the ..read more

Difficult to know exactly when the seed was sown, the idea mooted, just when the vision came before imagination’s eye. Like many artists beginning the journey towards a major exhibition Alice Fox was not forthcoming even to her friends as to what Findings might entail – ‘a lot of small things covering the walls’ was all she would say. To focus a body of work towards an end, a public presentation, is certainly something every art student experiences in preparing that ‘final show’. But for those carrying the certainty of a future career that final show is surely the first show, and of ..read more