Decon City, Rearranging the Threads

Gunta Stolz, the Bauhaus weaving master applied ideas from modern art to weaving, creating complex colorful compositions of geometric forms. She experimented with different materials and techniques to create a new weaving style and was fundamental in establishing weaving as an artistic medium. Her rythmic structural works involve many patterns and grid-like abstract forms.

From a Vouge Italia article on the Bauhaus movement, " "The medium is the message," wrote Marshall Mcluhan in 1967: an aesthetic motto according to which the medium was way more relevant than the message tied to it.  This rule had already been widely developed, between 1919 and 1933, by the Bauhaus current: a movement that was capable of including architecture, graphics, sculpture and painting, mixing them between them, as to achieve the highest and most complete result. 

The movement developed in factories, each of which was owned by prominent names. Among these one is particularly worth noting: Gunta Stolz, who managed, until 1931, the Bauhaus textile workshop. If needle and thread were the most irremovable standards for women's work, that had always, with no change, been handed down from mother to daughter, the movement did not seem intimidated by it and paved its meticulous work of deconstruction. The openness of the director allowed to liberate textures from the prejudices of the patriarchal setting, moving them towards highly technological horizons. The revived and almost forgotten concept of tekne, an art capable of bringing together an ancient language, the future, and a substantial system creative know-how, was shaped according to new convictions. While Gunta's laboratory was overshadowed by the most famous architectural and graphic ones, ironically it became the most profitable. Among the pieces appeared well-made rugs, tapestries and fabrics which, also thanks to their reasonable price, were easily placed in European homes. Made as if they were melodies, using the frame as if were a music sheet, the yarns required complex steps, each of which called for a specialized figure, like that of a textile designer, a figure that born in those years, and that for a long time it belonged to the multifaceted artist Anni Albers. " Read the full article @ www.vogue.it/en/encyclo/textiles/b/bauhaus

Similarly, Nigel Peake's illustrations capture his fascination with built structures and observations of life. His meditative drawings are influenced by his training as an architect. They capture details and parts of his observances and are pieced together to form a sort of tapestry of patterns. A video of him drawing is below.

Another artist Steven Vasquez Lopez is also interested in this meditative style of drawing. His work, based on woven plaids is focused on line and texture. His manually intensive process involves drawing each "thread" to create a plaid pattern. He said "It's all math, and I have to just count in my head the pattern while placing each colored line onto the page at one time... It's meticulous and laborious."