Textiles Workshop for the Art Scholars
Textiles artist Jayne Emerson worked alongside 9 of our Art and Design Scholars on Sunday 26th September. After introducing herself and her work process, we began to practically generate the ‘typographically’ based banners that students had planned prior to the day. These were based on students’ individual ideas and concerns ranging from environmental issues, racial and sexual inequality, persona, well-being and homosexuality.
Jayne trained at Loughborough College of Art graduating with a 1st Class Honours degree in Multimedia Textiles before completing her master’s at Central St Martins. Since then, her work has taken a wide-ranging path that has allowed her to express her creativity from craft through to couture.
For the past 18 years Jayne has created innovative fabric samples that explore the boundaries of modern embroidery, patchwork, fabric manipulation and needle felting. Her samples have sold to a wide range of clients that include Chanel, Calvin Klein, Nina Ricci, Louis Vuitton, Dior and Balenciaga as well as John Lewis Home, Top Shop, M and S and Boden.
Jayne’s studio in Gloucestershire is a treasure trove of vintage fabrics collected over many years of scouring flea markets, charity shops and boot sales. She has an extensive library of sewing books that fuel her reinventions of traditional techniques which she then combines to make ‘fabric recipes’. Her creative process will often start with an unusual or inspiring fabric which is then rendered unrecognisable from its original state by layers of processes and techniques. Jayne has recently decided to exhibit some of her previously unseen fabric samples as Textile Art.
Our students used an array of fabrics, Bondaweb, heat press, embellishing, felting and machine stitch techniques in order to bring these banners to fruition over the course of the day. The scholars worked incredibly hard all day with a real sense of direction and maturity and were, as ever a privilege to be working alongside.
You can see the highlights of the day here:
