What is Fibre Art?
From Wikipedia:
Fibre art refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fibre and other components, such as fabric or yarn. It focuses on the materials and on the manual labour on the part of the artist as part of the works’ significance, and prioritizes aesthetic value over utility.
The term fibre art came into use by curators and art historians to describe the work of the artist-craftsman following World War II. Those years saw a sharp increase in the design and production of “art fabric.” In the 1950s, as the contributions of craft artists became more recognized—not just in fibre but in clay and other media—an increasing number of weavers began binding fibres into nonfunctional forms as works of art.[1]
Since the 1980s, fibre work has become more and more conceptual, influenced by postmodernist ideas. For fibre artists, in addition to long-standing experimentation with materials and techniques, this brought “a new focus on creating work which confronted cultural issues such as: gender feminism; domesticity and the repetitive tasks related to women’s work; politics; the social and behavioural sciences; material specific concepts related to fibre’s softness, permeability, drapability, and so on.”
Find out more
Contact Sharon Johnson directly to find out more about her work in Fibre Art, and to find out where she is next exhibiting.