Author: Matilda McQuaid

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Image features: Small portrait showing a woman's eye and nose, resembling an out-of-focus black and white photograph. Study for Binary Traces: Kay (2007-33-1). Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Halfseen
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Lia Cook’s creative process combines photographic media and computer-aided technologies with a mastery of hand and powered Jacquard looms. Her black-and-white work is based on scanned photographs, which are manipulated on a computer. Digital technology enables her...
Image features: Crisp pleats in a series of alternating diagonals form a chevron pattern in this sheer scarf of mauve, pale green and pale blue. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Origami Pleat
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Origami Pleat was designed in 1997 by Reiko Sudo, one of Japan’s most important contemporary textile designers and co-founder of Nuno Corporation. The textile is a contemporary interpretation of centuries-old hand pleating. It is made by creating...
Images features: Field of 972 mosaic squares in different shades of blue and metallic with natural color palm fiber complementing the indigo and metallic and partially forming the frame of the mosaic. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Nebula
Venezuelan textile artists, Mariá Dávila and Eduardo Portillo describe their work as “driven by our relationship with our surroundings and how it can be communicated within a contemporary textile language.” Their hometown is Mérida, deep in the Andes Mountains, and like archaeologists they have been exploring this countryside for years, finding traces of human life...
Image features: Yardage of full manufactured width, silver-colored, metallic coated plain woven polyester with wavy linear pattern from the embossing. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Ripple Effect
Embossed Stainless Steel was designed by Reiko Sudo, one of Japan’s most important contemporary textile designers. Educated at Musashino Art University, she and Junichi Arai (Japanese, 1932–2017) were the co-founders in 1984 of the Japanese company and store, NUNO, which produces textiles of extraordinary ingenuity and beauty. Sudo and the other designers at NUNO combine...
Image features woven upholstery with an optical effect of waves radiating out from a center point. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Tough Twill
One of the greatest challenges in designing commercial textiles has been creating durable, cleanable, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing fabrics for highly trafficked and 24/7 environments like healthcare facilities, theaters and airports. In addition, there is more demand for textiles with sustainable manufacturing practices, and companies like Designtex are taking on this responsibility and producing some...
Image features: Embroidered and appliquéd rectangular panel with floral and geometric patterning. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Recycled Jamdani
Jamdani is a Persian term for the extremely fine hand woven figured muslins made in Bengal. Thicker cotton threads laid individually into the weft produce the illusion of a suspended pattern on the surface of an almost transparent cloth. Intricate color motives seem to float on the cloth. Jamdani is generally thought to have derived...
Image features textile of iridescent tan satin with blue highlights. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Blue Shimmering Light
From the archives, an Object of the Day post on an example of iridescent design from the collection.
Length of fabric in which squares of various woven and embroidered white Nuno fabrics are machine stitched to a water-soluble base cloth which is then dissolved away, leaving an open ground with 'floating' scraps. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object
Tradition and Technology
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Tsugihagi was designed by Reiko Sudo, one of Japan’s most important contemporary textile designers. Educated at Musashino Art University, she and Junichi Arai (Japanese, 1932–2017) were the co-founders in 1984 of the Japanese company and store, NUNO,...
The natural linen woven base cloth is stretched in tension on a wooden frame. Skeins or coils of bleached linen are alternately twisted in the 's' or 'z' directions, and anchored to the foundation by sewing them with strong linen thread using a semi-circular needle, allowing the artist to control and stabilize the volume.
Macro Embroidery
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Cour de Rohan, which bears the name of Sheila Hicks’s home in Paris, is an example of the artist’s “macro-embroidery” process, a scaled-up version of the embroidery stitch known as point de couchage or point lancé et...