The Munchies Art Club shares with you a selection of amazing contemporary female textile artists who push the boundaries of today's art world, kindling a historic practice and settling in as equals to any other medium or artistic process.
Much like ceramic art, textile art has found its place in the contemporary art scene.
We are thrilled to share with you in alphabetical order Oona Brangam-Snell, Jessica Costa, Regina Dejimenez, Megan Dominescu, Molly Kent, Katerina Konarovska and Julie Peter, 7 Female artists creating artworks, using ancient methods, for their modern day take on their lives, their surroundings and the world.
"My work seeks to highlight the enduring power of traditional symbols and their role incontemporary iconography, in an era where fabric design has been defined by digitization and industrial manufacturing.
Heavily influenced by centuries of textile production, from medieval tapestries to theater curtains, I draft my work as gouache paintings before redrawing them at scale in black and white and digitizing them into machine-loomed jacquard pieces.
Once they're woven, I often layer multiple textiles together and embellish areas with dimensional hand embroidery." -Oona Brangam-Snell
"I'm Jessica Costa, fiber artist from São Paulo, Brazil.
My production starts from a feminine subjectivity, but it develops mainly from a collective narrative of a generation of women and their manuals practices, crossing walls of the domestic environment with the perspective of occupying subjugate spaces within the art.
I explore mainly hand-machine knitting and tufting tapestry in installations that explore the architecture of spaces, such as textile objects that materialize in the doorways and walls.The application of color is an essential step in my process.
I use different yarns woven simultaneously to create hues and nuances for chromatic variations. I think this process of "painting with yarns" gives a new perspective over techniques that are historically less recognizable in the visual arts, as textiles.
I also work as a mentor and educator in the textile art field. I think that in the act of weaving and then unreveal something, you discover a remarkable parallel with life: when you try to get something right, you realize that you have to go steps back and accept the mistakes as part of the journey.”
"I work in collaboration with interior designers, architects and art directors for the realization of installations, textile textures and design objects.
My personal research is focused on the expressive possibilities textiles have. I explore the limits between Art, Craft and Design.
I personally view as textile structures that build layers.
If you think about it there are thousands of unseen of symbolic and touchable layers that make up the visible world.
The inside of our bodies create our organs, the skin retains these organs and the clothes we wear are the layers we choose collectively, creating a human society lives in a big high planetary ecological system.
I would like to dive in to the micro and macro weft to admire and share the details of this reality." -Regina Dejiménez
Megan Dominescu (b. 1997) is a visual artist, living and working in Bucharest, Romania.
She graduated from the Department of Painting at the National University of the Arts, Bucharest.
Megan’s clashing Romanian-American background is a strong inspiration in her practice. Megan’s work is focused on observing and documenting the absurd and celebrating the bizarre.
She is a member of the artist collective MOXA20 in and is one half of the DJ duo Miss Clitoral.
Megan’s hand-made textile artworks play with contemporary, real-world subjects and problems seen through a humorous lense.
Both eerie and endearing, Dominescu’s pieces exhibit a host of unique characters who interact with each other in comic book-like frames, each scene becoming a building block in Megan’s parallel universe.
We were very lucky to discover Megan at the Art Brussels 2022 and have been fans ever since.
'Molly Kent is a textile artist concerned with representing notions of mental and physical health through mediums such as rug tufting and weaving.
She portrays contemporary existence regarding social media and internet living and the effects this has on our perception of self.
This stems from her personal experiences of her mental health condition CPTSD but also reflects on wider anxieties and fears that have come to attention as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the beginning of 2021, after experiencing an episode of ill mental health, Kent’s work shifted towards a new project Dream Weaving.
DreamWeaving is a multi-award-winning body of work that records dreams and nightmares experienced by the artist as a result of her mental health condition.
This series of work features recurrent themes of falling, extreme weather and digital anxieties and offers a critical insight into how dream psychology can tell a lot about the inner workings of a person.
The work is inspired by symbolism, mysticism, myths and legends alongside personal symbols of the trauma Kent' suffered that led to her diagnosis.'
"I have been making tapestries since 2017. They are always based on my oil paintings, composed into digital collages and finally crafted in Tilburg Textile Museum.
I like the help of technology. It's a contemporary ghost and it does direct translation of painting
brush strokes by weaving.
The series of four woven tapestries 2017-2021 is a night dream mapping that overlaps with day life experiences.
These works are a combination of two streams of my interests that are painting and textile.
It’s a reflection on the old tradition of weaving, but the content is depicting night dreams rather than religion and city folklore mapping.
For these purposes I've been collecting dreams for 17 years and painting them together with overlapping day life experiences."-Kateřina Konarovská
Julie Peter (born 1985) is a danish artist with a triangular base between Hjørring(DK), Berlin(DE), Birkerød(DK).
Her works explore the absurd in the delimited freedom in our creation of norms. The repetitive waves and rhythm reflects the industrial methods used in her works that sometimes emits a cold and latent violence and a seductiveness.
She is fascinated by how the whole biological world is built out of fibers that are structured in bundles and serve very different properties even though they look alike.
The constant transformation her work is undergoing due to material choice and the production methods, where drawings on stone end up on paper and cheese wax becomes bronze, is rubbing off in her approach to sculpturing.
Julie Peter is curious when experimenting with materials, their collaboration and boundaries for a particular expression. Frames apply borders to sort out the underlying darkness in freedom of choice.
Julie Peter is baffled by the binaries we constantly make between you and me, between our “ruffian” and “educated” selves. She finds that the contradictions between belief and behaviour expose an implicit awkwardness, a humor that mirrors our own vulnerabilities.
A big thank you to all these wonderful artists who kindly shared their work with us to share with you!
