The Little Gems are featured on the Felt blog at the moment, so have a look!

It’s hard to believe that it’s maybe only 9 months since we all started getting together, there must be a Gem baby due any minute by those calculations! We’ll be trying to get some things together to run parallel to the up-coming Amazing Lace exhibition at Pataka. At the same time there’ll be a textile exhibition also at Pataka, so mark them in your diary!

AMAZING LACE
21 June– 28 September

Amazing Lace celebrates a current revival of lace ‘reinterpreted’ in contemporary art by a range of exciting artists including Lonnie Hutchinson, Jeff Thomson, Emily Wolfe, Cristina Beth, Ilse-Marie Erl and Kate Rivers. Photographs, jewellery, paintings and sculpture inspired by the intricate patterns of lace help to redefine how lace can be used and elevate it as an art form.

Exquisite historical lace will also be featured, including samples of the most famous European lace varieties such as Honiton, Chantilly and Brussels; these will be set against a backdrop of historical photographs illustrating how the tradition of lace was translated and adapted by colonial settlers in New Zealand.

The exhibition will enable students to study some of the techniques and processes involved in producing lace: the positive and negative spaces in the different designs and the historical impact of the social value of lace. Hands-on gallery activities will involve using, weaving and shaping threads and creating lace designs out of paper.

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SHARING STORIES – Textiles from around the world
21 June – 21 September

This exhibition will glow with the colours and textures of over 80 garments and textiles from around the world – each piece with its own innate story woven around it about how it journeyed to New Zealand.

We will unravel some of those stories and introduce your students to the cultures from which they were created and how and why they were made. Fabrics and garments from places like the Congo, Jerusalem, Myanmar, Malaysia, Iraq and India will adorn the walls, made out of everything from raffia, bark, and silk through to wool. The textiles in this exhibition represent thousands of years of history and they have been gathered together from private collections found all over the Wellington region.

(Orginally posted at Helen’s)