Postcolonial Textiles – kaitlyn morrison's blog

Some people would admit that textiles have the ability to “capture and convey cultural, national and individual identities”. Artists such as, Elaine Reichek, created a way to link textiles to the art world. She often called the textile the painting’s canvas. This idea that she had was interesting considering the boundary betwee 05A01_F23 n what is considered art and what is considered craft. “Throughout her work, Reichek uses the textile to help scrutinize alternative cultural perspectives”. Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian artist, made a special cloth named Batik cloth. “Since the mid- 1990s, his work has depicted clothed copulating couples, aliens, ballerinas, and the sails of sla how-to-blow-up-two-heads-at-once-ladies ve ships all reworked in wax resist cloth”. This cloth was imported but Indonesia did not accept it and soon found its way to West Africa. “Today wax resist cloth is a symbol of national pride associated with independence of the West African nations gained in the late 1950s through the 1970s, but this, too, is a ‘new’ tradition”. Susan Stockwell was a British artist who has a unique way of depicting art. She often used coffee filters, rubber, paper currency. “Materials that allude to the physical excess of our contemporary lives appe 1998_1b ar in re-creations of maps and dresses that refer to colonial-era expansion and trade.Trayne uses coffee filters to create a life-sized woman’s dress with a pronounced bustle. The filters remind us that the wealth behind the ownership of luxury clothing came directly from the trade of materials such as tea and coffee.” There was a famous piece of work called the Pattern of the World that used paper dressmaking with a pattern of sta 2006AJ8143 ined tea. “It provided us with yet another version of the scramble for Africa. To adapt the pattern to the wearer’s size, coincide with the tip of the African continent to provide yet another interpretation of the arbitrary madness that went into the creation of he contemporary African map. Stockwell seems to be telling us that skirts can be lengthened and shortened. Continents cannot, and should not”. Textiles can be used in many different ways to depict different meanings. Artists often use textiles to communicate a complicated idea. It can also be used to represent a culture. “The beauty of the textile is often deployed as a visual seduction used to package challenging narratives”.