Current issue | Letters Online | What's on | Webwatch | About us | Previous issues | Contact us | Subscribe/renew | Index | Terms & conditions | Your basket

Techno Textiles

Artists using their digits

Verna Suit

The digital age has changed life in many ways. Things are faster now and more complex - and sometimes better because of it. At other times, one's reaction is to step back and keep to a more leisurely, reflective, more human pace. Success, as in most things, is in finding the right balance.

For textile artists, the digital age offers tantalising possibilities. One can design on the computer and create original artwork, or scan in photographs, manipulate images at will, and then see instantly on the screen what has the potential for good design and what hasn't. With digital colour-printing processes, one has the use of a virtually unlimited palette - or at least the 2,000 or so colours that humans can realistically differentiate. And as computer automation liberates us from tedious, repetitive tasks, we have the capability of producing works of a size and complexity that previously would have been all but impossible.

However, it is the tactile quality of fibre with its human connection that often draws people to the medium in the first place. The challenge facing fibre artists today is to find the balance between hand and machine, deciding when and how to use digital technology, and when to preserve the personal connection and trust the five digits of the hand.

Susan Brandeis: Quintessence (detail), 2001.

Juxtaposition of screen and discharge printing on handweaving,
and digital printing with embroidery. 140 x 130 cm. Photo by Marc Brandeis.
Click the image to see a bigger version

Rebecca Stevens, a curator at Washington DC's Textile Museum, visited North Carolina State University's renowned textile department several years ago, and was intrigued by some of the new technologies she discovered there that were becoming available to artists. She conceived the idea for an exhibition that would feature the interconnected role of high-tech equipment and handwork. Technology as Catalyst: Textile Artists on the Cutting Edge was shown at the Textile Museum from February to July 2002, and will tour to North Carolina State University in Raleigh from 12 September to 18 December 2002.

The exhibition features six experienced textile artists. Susan Wilchins Brandeis, Lia Cook, Junco Sato Pollack, Cynthia Schira, Hitoshi Ujiie and Carol Westfall are all pushing the boundaries of textile art through various combinations of digital weaving, printing, and dyeing. The exhibition emphasises the creative choices that the artists make in their work.

In at least half the pieces in the show, the basis of design was the artist's manipulation of photographic imagery, a task uniquely served by digital technology. Susan Brandeis, for instance, combines different perspectives on the natural world. Digital printing, she has found, allows her to create work that is far more detailed and complex than she has made in the past. But she also remains firmly dedicated to a hands-on approach, and regularly chooses to combine low-tech and high-tech processes. In 'Quintessence' she juxtaposes screen-printed and discharged images of leaves on hand-woven fabric against hugely magnified, digitally-printed photographs of lichens from the forest floor. Then, with hand and machine embroidery, she emphasises the detail of the lichens' curved edges. As a result, 'Quintessence' is a complex study of nature's variety that continually rewards the viewer with new discoveries.

Carol Westfall: Ichi, Ni, San Carp, 2001.

Digital printing on silk. 100 x 143 cm.
Photo courtesy of the Textile Museum.
Click the image to see a bigger version

Carol Westfall's piece 'Ichi, Ni, San Carp' (One, Two, Three Carp) also focuses on realistic imagery from the natural world, but with zen-like simplicity. While photographing a pond one day, she happened to capture a carp at the split second that it broke the surface of the water. She then transferred that picture from her digital camera to her computer and manipulated it into a succession of three arrangements of carp, water and grasses. Next, she digitally printed pairs of the three images. In the Textile Museum exhibit, three silk panels hang suspended a foot in front of their identical twins. The three pairs of images reflect the passing of a brief, ineffable moment in time.

Other artists working today are finding their own ways of successfully marrying computer imagery and textile techniques. Beth Cassidy and Jeff Brice recently merged two independent careers to spin off a third, Diagram Design. Cassidy creates sophisticated quilts pieced from luxury fabrics, and Brice is a commercial illustrator who designs computer graphics for corporate customers. When Cassidy saw some of the graphic patterns that Brice was creating, she recognised their potential as patterns for fabrics. The two artists joined forces to begin producing a line of silk quilts and other interior textiles which are printed with Brice's computer imagery.

Some of their patterns are photographic images from nature, as in 'Rock Blocks', but others are obviously computer-generated. In most of the quilts, a dense background of free-motion machine quilting unites the image blocks. Central to the couple's new venture was their purchase of a 52-inch Roland inkjet printer, chosen for its flexibility to print on both watercolour paper for Brice's gallery prints, and the full width of silk yardage for the textiles.

Beth Cassidy and Jeff Brice: Rock Blocks. 2001.

228 x 262 cm. Photo by Ron Sawyer.
Click the image to see a bigger version

Despite digital colour-printing's increased capabilities, it has not been widely adopted for production use in commercial textiles. Preparation time is much faster than with silk-screening methods, but the actual printing time is much slower. For fibre artists who usually create one-off pieces and are not so concerned with production speed, digital printing can be ideal. Ironing fabric to a sheet of freezer-paper and feeding it into a desktop printer is a tried and true method for printing on a smaller scale. For natural fibres such as silk or cotton, inkjet printers work quite well, especially when the fabric is pre-soaked in a special solution to make the image permanent. For synthetic fabrics such as polyester, dye sublimation cartridges are available for use with laser printers.

Artist Linda Behar took a different approach to combining computer-manipulated imagery and stitch. She is known for creating embroideries with photographic realism, and recognised in digital technology the possibility of going a step further: to translate actual photographs into embroideries. The photographs that interested her were old family pictures, taken before the days of digital cameras could have delivered already-digitised images to her computer. However, she scanned the photographs into her computer and digitised them manually, with the help of Adobe Photoshop software (see review on page 49).

Her first step in this process was to 'posterise' the picture - that is, reduce it to five shades of black, greys and white that would correspond to the monochromatic shades of embroidery threads she planned to use. She then 'pixelated' it into a mosaic of tiny squares and printed the result. At this point she resorted to the low-tech tools of T-square and drawing board to ink in the lines that delineated the grid of pixels. This created a chart from which she could do the actual embroidery, simply by counting how many pixels/squares of each colour were in a row, and stitching accordingly. One pixel of the photograph was equal to one cross-stitch or needlepoint stitch. For reference, she kept at hand a continuous-tone enlargement of the same photograph, making adjustments to the areas of colour as needed.

Linda Behar: Blanket: Wrapped in My Parents' Love. 2000.

Cross-stitch on thermal blanket. 162 x 238 cm. Photo by David Caras.
Click the image to see a bigger version

In the examples shown here, 'Blanket: Wrapped in My Parents' Love' is quite large and is done in cross-stitch on a loosely woven cotton thermal blanket. By contrast, 'Tricycle' is a small needlepoint piece. 'I purposely allowed the image to be somewhat fuzzy,' Behar says of 'Tricycle', 'so that it had the effect of being like a memory just out of reach.'

In the Textile Museum show, weaver Lia Cook also chose family photographs of herself as a child as her subject matter, and used digital technology to translate them into fibre. For 'Big Baby' (see cover of this issue) she scanned in the photograph and wove the picture by hand on a computerised loom, making design decisions as she went along. Because of the very large scale of this piece, instead of simplifying the photograph she added pixels to sharpen details.

Linda Behar: Tricycle, 2000.

Needlepoint. 23 x 15 cm. Photo by David Caras.
Click the image to see a bigger version

Artist Annet Couwenberg's use of digital technology has moved in a somewhat different direction. The potential of computerised embroidery machines attracted her interest when she first discovered one four years ago. As a teacher, she feels a responsibility to keep up to date with new technologies, so she investigated what the new machines could do. What interested her most was the discovery that she could program an embroidery machine to stitch her own computer-manipulated designs. She soon acquired a computerised embroidery machine and urged Maryland Institute's College of Art, where she chairs the Textile Department, to buy three more for the use of its students.

Much of Couwenberg's work addresses the issue of gender roles, the value of tradition and the attendant requirement to conform. Growing up in the regulated culture of the Netherlands helped develop her interest in such themes. Frequent images in her work are undergarments - restrictive corsets and bustles that reshape women's bodies into standardised, culturally approved ideals of beauty. These anonymous undergarments became Couwenberg's symbols for standardised expectations of women.

Her computerised embroidery machine serves her well in exploring this symbolic image. It allows her to represent the same corset motif in various attitudes - different colours, sizes, stitch patterns, directional orientations - or to make multiple repetitions of one motif. Her 'Embroidery Frolic' series represents a set of fantasy merit badges for her sisters and herself, at the same time referencing fine Dutch textile traditions. Each of the four trophies attests to how each daughter has met her own target. The background and the cookie-cutter arrangement of corset shapes on each trophy were computer-embroidered to emphasise their uniformity.

The new digital processes available to fibre artists today offer exciting possibilities, limited only by the imagination. But in addition to investments in equipment, the new technology also necessitates learning complex computer software. In the catalogue to the Textile Museum exhibit, educator Bhakti Ziek compares this process to learning a foreign language. 'To be coherent you must learn the nuances of the programs, which means translating the way you think into the way the programmer thinks, then figuring out ways to meet your intentions.'

Perhaps young people today who grow up computer-literate as a matter of course, will come to college textile departments and find in digital applications of textiles the tactile contact that is missing from their lives.

Verna Suit lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. She frequently writes on the fibre arts, and was co-author of the book Art Quilts: Playing with a Full Deck, which complements the Full Deck exhibition that has been touring the USA since 1995.

This article is from Embroidery, Volume 53 No.4, © Verna Suit.