Textiles and Spirituality
February 18, 2014
In the video Art in the 21st Century, my favorite spiritual artist was Ann Hamilton. Her medium of textiles is something of interest to me. While I am not a very good seamstress, I am passionate about style, fabric, and clothing as art. She connects writing and textiles in an interesting way, stating that the threads of the fabric are like the continuous line of a story. I like to take this relationship one step further by stating that the look of a textile or of a work of fashion tells a related story. Rachel Zoe, a Los Angles based fashion designer, once said, “Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak”. This often includes a deeper analysis beyond noting that someone wearing athletic shorts might play basketball. The complied aesthetic of the clothing tells a story about the person.
Grey (2001) discusses how an artists eye sees the outer beauty, the symbolic beauty, and the relationship between the two stating, “The artist’s three eyes of knowing are inspired by the radiant spiritual beauty of the subject, fascinated by the subject’s harmonic structure” (74). This idea relates to Hamilton’s use of textiles and clothing in the way they have practical beauty, symbolic beauty, and an interaction between the two.
One Response to “Textiles and Spirituality”
February 22nd, 2014 at 2:03 am
Hi, CjB
My favorite artist was Ann Hamilton In the video Art in the 21st Century too. I like the way you described her textile work which is comparing with writing process. However, she is also working in other area of art, such as photographs and lights effect. All works of art have similar process: formulation, saturation, incubation, inspiration, translations and integration (Grey, 75). I believe Ann’s major focus of her job is harmony since her work was related a lot to nature. She made herself as a camera in one of her work, and took pictures of environments and people. We also can see it from her first design: the clothes of hedgehog, which connected nature and human being. Grey also said: “the masterful artist transcends the limited sense of self and becomes an active channel of universal creative spirit” (82). I believe that Ann is a master artist: she is brave to try new form of art, active to connect art with other field, such as physical area. As Gray mentioned that “The artist’s three eyes of knowing are inspired by the radiant spiritual beauty of the subject, fascinated by the subject’s harmonic structure” (74), I believe there are a lot radiant spiritual beauty in our life and the key point is whether people to make their spirituality real in our life. Ann is the one who would make her spirituality coming from real and show to us in really life, what is what a masterful artist does.