UK
Athens born and London based artist Ismini Samanidou trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. Her practice touches on the boundaries of craft, art and design with work developed for site specific commissions, industry collaborations and unique pieces for exhibition.
Her work has been exhibited internationally with solo shows in the UK and USA and has just completed an invited residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, USA. Ismini’s textiles are held in private and public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Jerwood Contemporary Makers award for Timeline, a large-scale textile installation.
Ismini has lectured internationally including The Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins in London, Textile Kultur Haslach in Austria and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina USA.
Simon Barker works across the fields of architecture, art and design, exploring the potential of site specific and collaborative practice through research, exhibitions and commissions.?He is interested in the diverse processes through which places become distinctive and the historical formation of landscape through social process and architecture. His practice investigates sonic, cinematic and photographic languages as a means to engage in these ideas of place and meaning. His interpretations, re-constructions and compositions are explored through moving image, sound and visual installation, often making use of archival materials and photographic documentations. ?Based in England, he has exhibited internationally and has work in public and private collections.
In the summer of 2014 we began a range of projects around the life and work of Anni Albers (1899-1994), while on a residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, USA. This included weaving, drawing, photography, film, sound art and installation.
We had hands on access to Josef and Anni Albers archive and were specifically invited to research and work with Anni Albers’ weaving archive, which until that time was little explored. We discovered parts of Anni Albers looms that she had used at Black Mountain College and were able to restore them to a working condition, and to weave on them. It was particularly interesting to learn about Anni Albers’ connections to other important figures of 20th Century science and art culture.
We were especially interested in her relationship to Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) and John Cage (1912-1992), pioneers of the relational qualities of structure and societies (Fuller) and the operation of chance and the accidental (Cage). We are a collaborative partnership of two artists, one trained in weaving and one in architecture. We are interested in the points of intersection between these two fundamental human disciplines. Both have the making of structures as their central concern, both are inseparable from human relations and politics.
Heddle Construction
One of the works we made as a result of this research was a large scale construction using a set of 638 heddles bought by accident by Anni Albers and left unused for 60 years and found by us in the archive.
The heddle, a fundamental part of a loom, is used to holds the warp threads in alignment and depending to separate them for the passage of the weft. They are suspended from the shafts of a loom. They can be made of thread, wire, or pressed metal, they vary in length, but all have an eye in the centre like the eye of a needle, through which the thread passes. There is one heddle for each thread of the warp.
The heddles organize the threads into groupings and move the groups of threads according to the greater needs of the weaving of the textile.
We had become interested in the triangulated structures of Buckminster Fuller and the way in which the visual qualities of these had come to represent his utopian aims. Fuller’s interest in incredibly lightweight and sustainable structures led us to experiment with making the largest structure we could from his friend AnniAlbers’ small bundle of pressed metal heddles.
Weaving & Metaphor
For our proposed new piece that extends this idea, we have researched the possibility of obtaining other surplus heddles from many different sources, and will then use these to investigate other ways of improvising further textile-like structures. These will then be hung as elements within a space to create an inhabitable environment.
The diverse range of heddles and their playful use in this way invite reflection on the status of weaving as a fundamental, global language of making , that was so important to Anni Albers, and her belief in the importance of responding to materials and their potential with an open mind.
We have been interested in the ancient Greek use of weaving as a metaphor. Before Plato proposed weaving as a model for society in the Statesman, where the different strands of society would be interwoven as a functional strong ‘fabric’, Aristophanes in Lysistrata had already used the weaving metaphor. Accepting the central role of women in weaving, and the status of weaving as the supreme social craft, Aristophanes has them taking over the running of the state because of their weaving skills, which make them better suited to this task of government than men.
