Textile Sculpture - Part 2: El Anatsui, Takashi Horisaki, Loren Schwerd

The work of El Anatsui, Takashi Horisaki and Loren Schwerd was recently exhited in New Orleans as part of Prospect 1, the largest international biennial of contemporary art ever organized in the USA - it was housed in over 2 dozen venues (including musuems, galleries, historic buildings and other sites)throughout the city.

EL ANATSUI– is a Ghanian artist who creates monumental and stunning sculptural works of “Women’s Cloth” by sewing thousands of aluminum bottle caps together with copper wire. The above photo was taken at the Prospect 1 installation by Dorothy Moye.

Of El Anatsui's work, Holland Cotter of the New York Times wrote (November 2005): “In Mr. Anatsui's hands, it is a shining, new kind of cloth, permeable but indestructible. It is a universal repository of names of infinite extension. Glinting and shimmering, it reflects an African essence of three interchangeable parts always in motion: memory, reality, determination.”

http://elanatsui.com/

Interview with El Anatsui by Alisa LaGamma, Curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art - you can listen to a podcast or read the transcript

https://metropolitanmuseum.org/podcast/detail.asp?read=all&eid=epNum022

2006 New York exhibit Catalogue – 13 pages
http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/newsletters/el_anatsui_ny/

October Gallery Photos - stunning
http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/microsites/anatsui/

El Anatsui: Gawu Photo Tour – Once you’ve clicked the PhotoTour link, make sure to maximize the page size for some stunning close-up views.

http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/incEngine/?theme=fowler_main&content=information_manager&information_manager_id=65

El Anatsui: Gawu Artworks – listen to podcasts of El Anatsui discussing three of the artworks in the exhibit

http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/gawu/artworks.html

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TAKASHI HORISAKI – does “…sculptural exploration of surfaces and the histories contained within their layers…" He created "fabric" out of latex and paint and used it to recreate the semblance of a Katrina destroyed home. On his website are links to a lot of information about the installation including: his blog documentation of the creation process; images of the work in progress; the link to a Times-Picayune article about it; and links to images of other works and installations.

http://www.takashihorisaki.com/

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LOREN SCHWERD – the artist states: “Mourning Portrait began as a series of memorials to the communities of New Orleans that were devastated by the flooding which followed Hurricane Katrina. These commemorative objects are made from human hair extensions of the type commonly used by African-American women that the artist found outside The St Claude Beauty Supply. The portraits draw on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of hairwork, in which family members or artisans would fashion the hair of the deceased into intricate jewelry and other objects as symbols of death and rebirth. Working from her own photographs, Schwerd creates metal armatures that act as frameworks for weaving the hair into portraits of the vacant houses of the Ninth Ward neighborhood. By documenting private homes Schwerd venerates the city’s losses, both individual and collective. Hair acts as the central metaphor to evoke a sense of profound intimacy and absence, and speaks to the racial politics that have paralyzed the city’s recovery effort.”
http://www.lorenschwerd.com/

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Textile Sculpture - Part 1

http://creativityjourney.blogspot.com/2009/02/textile-sculpture-part-1.html