PUPPET SHOW

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Susie Vickery’s toy boy

Susie Vickery is introducing the new man in her life - 18th century French botanist, JacquesJulien Houtou de Labillardière. ‘He feels almost real to me,’ she laughs, displaying her puppet in his intricately embroidered clothing, made from antique linen, cotton and silk. De Labillardière is a metre tall. His 19th century waistcoat is embroidered with the Western Australian bluebell (billardièra fusiformi) created using a slate frame; while his tailcoat came from an antique piece of Lao weaving. ‘It did feel like a sacrifice but now it’s taken on a life of its own,’ says Vickery, who has been using up all the beautiful fabric she has been hoarding for years. The botanist’s slippers are made from Hmong cutwork pieces bought in Kathmandu 18 years ago. She decorated them with metalwork crowns bought at the Hand & Lock conference a few years ago. A half-scale male dress stand displays a change of outfit. His orange Banyan (dressing gown) is made from an antique Burmese Chin lungi given to Vickery by friends in Myanmar when she was working there. The lining is an old silk sari from India and the collar and cuffs are made from an antique Parsi sari border. De Labillardière was a botanist on a French expedition to Oceania in 1792 (two years after the French Revolution started), travelling on the ship Recherche, which visited Vickery’s home state of Western Australia. And now, thanks to Vickery, de Labillardière is returning to Australia 227 years after landing there.

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The project has allowed Vickery to combine all her favourite things - costume making, puppets, embroidery, men’s tailoring, and animation. Vickery, who specialises in embroidered textile art, is an expert in 19th century men’s tailoring. She worked as a costumier for theatre and film in Australia and the UK for 20 years. When her British husband got a job in Nepal in the 1990s, she worked with women’s handicraft groups there. She decided to combine her twin passions - development work and fine art embroidery and to study embroidered textiles by distance learning, graduating from London Middlesex University in 2009. Then in 2016, after 20 years in South Asia, she and her husband bought a house in Fremantle, Western Australia, so she could spend more time with her elderly mother. She also started teaching an annual masterclass in 19th century men’s tailoring at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Keen to work more in 3D, she began making a puppet. ‘I have always tried to get movement into my embroideries with animation and automata. I want them to be more than static images on the wall. One of my favourite things was the problem solving, working out how to achieve something technical and learning all sorts of new skills.’ To create de Labillardière she devoured puppetry and dollmaking websites, researching joints, styles and making techniques. She set herself the challenge that her puppet would be embroidered, wear fabulous 19th

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LIFE’S RICH TAPESTRY

Revisiting tapestry in post-WWII Poland

In the wake of WWII, the nascent Polish communist government saw in pre-WWI artisan cooperatives a model for post-war economic development consistent with its anti-capitalist stance and aligned with its nation-building goals. Under the auspices of an agency called Cepelia— an acronym for the Centre of Folk and Artistic Industry—the government organised a nationwide network of artisan cooperatives charged with producing ‘folkloric’ and ‘artistic’ work. To inform the folkloric work, Cepelia engaged ethnographers and artists-as-ethnographers (especially in the early years, 1949-1956) to document rural textile practices. This ethnography then shaped the production of so-called ‘folkloric’ textiles inspired by vernacular cultural traditions. Cepelia marketed and sold both folkloric and artistic work via a nationwide network of retail outlets where they became visual markers of an emerging urban Polish middle class and served as souvenirs that visitors might purchase as momentos of their experience of Poland. Cepelia also exported these same sorts of blankets, kilims and tapestries to retail outlets in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, and beyond. Emboldened by new international connections Cepelia facilitated, many Polish textile artists joined a vanguard of fibre artists who entered works that were accepted in the Lausaunne International Tapestry Biennials (1962-1995), and who travelled internationally to attend the openings of fibre art exhibitions and give artist talks and demonstrations at Cepelia’s retail stores. Daniel Stone, in his 2009 article, ‘Cepelia and Folk

Arts Industries in Poland, 1949-1956’, published in The Polish Review characterised as ‘craft activists’ the people at Cepelia who supported Polish artists creating place-based textiles. These artists were imaginatively responding to post-WWII material constraints, effectively evading the ideological structures of communist-dictated socialist realism, and side-stepping modernist art debates. It appears that Polish artists often chose to work within and for Cepelia to turn centralised governmental efforts to promote a nationalist Polish identity rooted in so-called ‘folk’ traditions to their own advantage. In the face of the terrible destruction that WWII wrought, textile artists’ experiments with non-traditional materials, three dimensional forms, and visual iconographies that alternately referenced rural crafts, pre-partitioned Poland, and 19th century landscape painting, all participated in a process of rebuilding their country and reconstructing a Polish experience of national identity that was not communist and not especially modernist. Cepelia greatly facilitated this tenaciously hopeful process that craft activists and artists undertook after WWII to constitute an art community that enlivened and sustained an under-the-radar, politically charged art movement that continually revisited what it meant to be Polish under communism. At the micro and macro levels Cepelia forged an arts and crafts infrastructure that supported a wide range of place-based artmaking on a relatively large scale that ultimately made possible the innovations now associated with the late 20th century school of Polish tapestry.

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The Fabric of Modernity

Biennial, 1983), and the environment (15th Biennial, 1992), works moved off the wall and beyond the institutional container of the museum – as happens in many internationally curated Biennials – into environmental and urban space. Lausanne became a city filled with flags, sacks, and ropes suspended throughout its parks and gardens. The achievements of the Lausanne International Tapestry Biennials are significant, particularly in terms of the visibility of textile works (loaning works to international exhibitions), and the challenge to conventional definitions of tapestry by giving opportunities to artists who demonstrated the creativity that could result from material invention and technical innovation. From 1995 onwards exciting initiatives were developing in China. Professor Lin Lecheng, from the Academy of Arts & Design at the Tsinghua University in Beijing, was so disappointed at not being able to see a Lausanne Biennial when he visited in 1996, that he decided to establish one in China. His intention was to maintain the spirit of an international show of modern and contemporary textile art, as well as expressing appreciation and recognition of the historical and cultural significance of Lausanne. Meanwhile, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, the textile exhibitions Fiber Visions (2013) and Weaving and We (2016) offer further examples of the impact of Lausanne on material practices and emerging fibre artists. Janis Jefferies

This winter the Kunsthalle Munich presents a spectacular exhibition of tapestries designed by great artists of the 20th century, and produced by the historic tapestry factories Beauvais, Aubusson, and the Manufacture des Gobelins, as well as Savonnerie, the most prestigious European manufactory of knotted-pile carpets. Roger Diederen, Director of Kunsthalle Munich and curator of The Fabric of Modernity. Matisse,  Picasso, Miró...and the French Tapestry, introduces the exhibition. The grand art of tapestries has always been associated with power and spectacle. In this exhibition this becomes evident in two rather startling tapestries commissioned by the Nazis. Göring was a huge admirer of the Gobelins produced in France, and the minute Paris was occupied, he commissioned enormous tapestries to adorn his private residence ‘Carinhall’, outside Berlin. One, only half finished, is seven metres high and was to adorn his library, showing the terrestrial globe surrounded by allegorical figures. It is the desire to rule the world as expressed in a tapestry. Another, destined for Ribbentrop's ministry, shows three oxen pulling a Roman carriage with a goddess of fertility holding a standard with a swastika. Three and a half kilos of gold were used in the form of gold thread. They look slightly ridiculous, especially as the designer Piener was not the greatest of painters, but they demonstrate how in the 20th century tapestries still were seen by some as ideal means of displaying power. But

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already in the 1930, someone like Jean Lurçat introduced a novel approach towards the medium. He was a communist and active in the resistance, thus, his fascination for tapestries was more about continuing the great French craftsmanship tradition that weavers had developed since the Middle Ages. Later, an architect like Le Corbusier saw in tapestries a natural extension of the physical spaces he designed. After WWII, grand narrative cycles in tapestry form become rare and for true modernists, making tapestries was more about continuing a grand design tradition than about the display of power and wealth. But still to this day, the Elysée Palace, seat of the French president, is being adorned with tapestries and the French government supports the Gobelins manufactory by steadily commissioning new tapestries in order to keep the tradition alive. Modernist artists, whenever they used tapestry, understood the value of artistry and craftsmanship. The outright historicist or neoBaroque tradition as seen in a Post-World War I tapestry is abandoned after 1945, and from then on, artists rediscovered the textile art form with its own possibilities and challenges. The extremely time-consuming production is, of course, one of these challenges, but, at the same time, also one of its great charms. Roger Diederen The Fabric of Modernity: Matisse, Picasso, Miró … and French Tapestries is at Kunsthalle Munich until 8 March 2020 www.kunsthalle-muc.de Co

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Below; Joan Miró (1893–1983) Composition No.1,Woman at the mirror, 1966, Manufacture des Gobelins 306 455cm, wool

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CONCEPT textiles in fine art 46 LIFE'S RICH TAPESTRY Revisiting tapestry in post-WWII Poland by Jane Przybysz. Magdalena Abakanowicz by Mary Jane Jacobs, The Lausanne International Tapestry Biennials by Janis Jefferies The Fabric of Modernity by Roger Diederen EVENTS dates for your diary 8-15 August 2020, Clarissa Hulse, Botanical Prints, Chateau Dumas, France 8-15 August 2020, Mandy Pattullo, Recycle, Repair and Reconsider, Chateau Dumas, France 22-29 August 2020, Susie Vickery, Making Historic French Mannequins, Chateau Dumas, France 22-29 August 2020, Emily Jo Gibbs, Illustrative pictures, Chateau Dumas, France PRIZES THIS ISSUE A gorgeous wash bag made from Liberty Tana Lawn, worth £25.95 www.alicecaroline.com Vedat Demiralp runner, worth £340 www.cobanrugs.com Madder Studio classic Nuno pillow, worth £270 www.maddastudio.com Throw from Romney Marsh Wool, worth £70 www.romneymarshwools.co.uk

INFORM the latest news, reviews and exhibition listings

03 BIAS /CONTRIBUTORS A letter from the founder, Polly Leonard 07 NEWS TEXTO A global gathering for textile lovers, the Zay Initiative, Artesanías de Colombia, the Soft World, Sara Brennan, Dutzi 84 READ The Pocket, a Hidden History of Women’s Lives 16601900 by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, Yale University Press, 2020 reviewed by Sarah Jane Downing. Threads

Around The World: From Arabian Weaving to Batik in Zimbabwe, by Deb Brandon, Schiffer Publishing, reviewed by Sonia Ashmore 86 VIEW Vera Paints a Scarf: The Art and Design of Vera Neumann, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, unil 26 January 2020 www. madmuseum.org reviewed by Magali An Berthon, Tim Walker: Wonderful Things, V&A Museum, London, until 8 March

2020 www.vam.ac.uk reviewed by Dani Trew. Zandra Rhodes; 50 Years of Fabulous, Fashion and Textile Museum, London until 26 January 2020 reviewed by Corinne Julius Weaving Beyond the Bauhaus, Art Institute of Chicago, until 17 February, 2020 www.artic.edu reviewed by JoAnn Greco 95 COMING NEXT RETHINK Picking up a new thread

SELVEDGE ('selvid3) n. 1. finished differently 2. the non-fraying edge of a length of woven fabric. [: from SELF + EDGE]

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