Director of the Constance Howard Resource
Research Centre in Textiles and Artistic Director of Goldsmiths Digital Studios
Jefferies was trained as a painter and later pioneered the field of contemporary textiles within visual and material culture, internationally through exhibitions and texts.
In the last five years she has been working on technological based arts, including Woven Sound (with Dr. Tim Blackwell) and has been a principal investigator on projects involving new haptics technologies by bringing the sense of touch to the interface between people and machines and generative software systems for creating and interpreting cultural artefacts, museums and the external environment. She is an associate researcher with Hexagram (Institute of Media, Arts and Technologies, Montreal, Canada) on two projects, electronic textiles and new forms of media communication in cloth.
She has also set up and now convenes the Thursday Club was set through Goldsmiths Digital Studios ( GDS) as an informal setting for research discussions and presentations of cross-disciplinary work-in-progress. It has by now grown to include 150 members: artists, technologists, scientists, researchers, students –in fact, a growing diversity of people from different communities in London and worldwide, that are now connected via an online forum and discussion group.Janis Jefferies sits on Academic Board, the Graduate School Board, OBD (Business Unit), Widening Participation and Chairs the MAKE advisory board.
Curatorial projects:
1990 Curator 'Textile Art: Textiles from the Pierre Pauli Association and the Lausanne Biennial', Switzerland, Salts Mill, Bradford, April-June 1990
1992 Curator (sole) Invited UK selector of 7th International Tapestry Triennial, Lodz, Poland, June 1992
1995 Advisor to Lausanne Biennial, Switzerland
1995 Curator (sole) Invited UK selector of 8th International Tapestry Triennial, Lodz Poland, June 1995
2006 “Process Revealed: An exhibition of generative and digital works”, Artpool artspace and research centre, Budapest, Hungary. Co-curated with Tim Blackwell.
2004-2006 Crafts Council of England: Curatorial project, “Boys that Sew”.
National touring exhibition, February 2004 –February 2005.
2008-2009 “Crafting Geometry”, Spark Plug curatorial award, Crafts Council working with alumnus May Cornet on the relationship between math, textiles and geometry.
2007 Curator and Chair of “Textile 07”, Art Biennial, Lithuania
Key publications include:
“Laboured Cloth: Translations of Hybridity in Contemporary Art”, in The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production, The Art School of the Art Institute of Chicago/MIT Press, USA, (eds. Joan Livingston and John Ploof), 2007
“Touch Technologies and Museum Access”, Touch in Museum: Policy and Practice in Object Handling edited by Helen Chatterjee, Berg Publishers, 2008,
“Contemporary Textiles: The Art Fabric”, in Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2008
Interfaces of Performance edited by Janis Jefferies, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Rachel Zerihan, Ashgate Publishing, 2009
“One and another: a handshake with the ancestors” in The Shape of Things, Alinah Azadeh, The Gifts, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery,
Guest Editor for “Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture”, Tensions: Transformations and Social practices, with Dr. Graeme Were (UCL, London). Vol. 8, Number 1, 2010
“The Artist as Researcher in a Computer Mediated Culture”, in Art Practices in a Digital Culture, eds Gardiner and Gere, Ashgate Publishing, 2010
“Loving Attention: An outburst of craft in contemporary art” in Extra/ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art, Duke University Press, USA, (editor, Maria Buszek, Kansas City Art Institute, USA). 2010
“… and some trace of he”: Katie Mitchell's Waves in Multi Media Performance, Women: A Cultural Review, Taylor and Francis, Volume 22, Issue 4, 2011
Curatorial Grants
Janis Jefferies currently holds a Crafts Council Spark Plug curating award that seeks to examine the creative and dynamic relationship between mathematics, mathematical forms and craft through an exploration of a particular maths and textile archive, called Common Threads, that is held in the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles, Goldsmiths, University of London.
has been lecturing around the world, in Japan, UK, Ireland, Finland
Head of Textile Department currently is a visiting research professor in China Academy of Art at the “Varbanov” Institute of Tapestry and Studio for Space and Fiber Art, Sculpture Department in Hangzhou, China
Markarov was trained as an artist in China, make his degree in traditional Chinese calligraphy and later in the field of contemporary textiles, researching in UK and Japan.
As an artist he works in different fields of visual art as painting, printmaking, works with hand made paper, calligraphy, sculptures and installations in space. His works have been exhibited in 15th Lausanne Biennial for contemporary textile art in Switzerland, 7th International Cairo Biennial of Contemporary Art, 10th International Lodz Triennial of Tapestry in Poland, "Fascinatie Texstyle 2" in the Museum Van Bommel-van Dam, Venlo in Holland, “Estampa” Madrid, Second Beijing Biennial for Contemporary Art, “August in art”, Festival of Contemporary art, Varna, Bulgaria and other major group exhibitions in Bulgaria.
Curatorial projects:
Curator (sole) Invited China’is selector of 8th International Tapestry Triennial, Lodz, Poland, 1995. It curates the Bulgarian artists’ participation in “ESTAMPA 2000” and 2001, and Second Beijing Biennial for Contemporary Art.
Co – curates tour exhibitions “Wind from east” for Casa de Vacas, Madrid and Santillana del Mar, Spain in 2001 and the “Contemporary textile art” an exhibition with Japanese and Bulgarian artists in the National Art Gallery in Bulgaria with Keiko Kawashima in 2002.
Research Associate of Varbanov Tapestry Research Center
He was born in 1965 in Harbin,from 1986 to 1997 ,he majored in oil painting in China Academy of Art,and subsquently he studied in Department of Art in Kassel University and arts context in Berlin University of Art.Ultimately,besides his unique art style ,he also had outstanding achievements in studies of theories of Chinese and Western art and succeeded in organizing international arts communication programs.
Now he is member of of German Artists Association, the chairman of Euro-Asia Culture and Education Advancement Society in Berlin,and council member of Association of Arts and philosophy of Berlin, lives in Hangzhou and Berlin.
His excellent art works win him great reputation ,collected worldwide.On one hand,the concept of his art and spacial research comes from Yi Jing,on the other hand,his art works not only contain the Asia elements,but also something absorbed from his comprehension of western culture.
Curatorial projects:
1997 'Side By Side: Chinese artists in Berlin ',Berlin University of Art
1997 'Heaven Axis – Berlin International Arts Exhibition',Pisma Haus
2002 International Exhibition'Time-Ink Element Berlin',Bundes Pressamt,Berlin
2002 'Red Star Traversing Europe', Berlin,Kassel,Paris
2002 Summer School program between China Academy of Arts and Berlin Art University,Hangzhou
2006 Master college program between China Academy of Arts and Berlin Art University,Hangzhou
2004-2007 West Lake cultural square project,Hangzhou
2007 planning of sculpture of Taizhou city,Taizhou
2007 faculty members exhibition of the Sculpture Department of the China Academy of art,Shanghai city sculpture center
2008 the Hangzhou 3rd West Lake International Sculpture Exhibition
2009 The Fifth Dimension: Fiber and Space Art,the National HeXiangNing Art Museum, Shenzhen and Shanghai MOMA
Key art activities:
1990 Muscat Biennale, Oman
1992 Exhibition of Works of Shan Zeng in Kassel
Behavioral art event outside of Kassel Documente
1993 Works of Shan Zeng in Düsseldorf, sponsored by German Exhibition Association
Prediction - Works of Shan Zeng, in Gallery #47 in London
1995 Berlin Freelance Arts Exhibition
1996 Moloka - Peripheral of the Wold in Kassel Documenta Hall, Germany
1997 Asian, African and Latin American Art Exhibition in Bogota, the Republic of Columbia
1998 Heaven Axis – Berlin International Arts Exhibition, Prismahouse, Berlin
Two Spaces and One Object ,Magedeburg, Germany
1999 24.th, International Artists Exhibition , Tokyo Art Museum, Japan
2000 8.th,Planair – Beyond the 7 Oceans, International Arts Exhibited in Wernigeode, Germany
2002 Red Star Traversing Europe – dialogue with Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany
2003 E:Time Ink Element – Berlin International Arts Exhibition, German Federal News Agency
2004 Ink Element – Works of Shan Zeng exhibited in Zhunan Art Museum in Taiwan
