Tag: Textile Artists

Recap - Sunday Session

Recap: Dee Crofts’ Sunday Session

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland
Deirdre Crofts shared her work at our recent Sunday Session

Written by Committee Member Loli Cox

Feltmakers Ireland was honoured to host Deirdre “Dee” Crofts on Sunday, the 9th of February. Dee shared her Felting and Art journey with 30 visitors and members of Feltmakers Ireland.

Dee, with some of her sculptures

And of course, she made us laugh!
Inspired by traditional ‘Green Men’ sculptures, Dee has made a series of faces coming out of foliage.
The “Old Woman who Swallowed a Fly’ is on the table in front of Dee.

Dee, a long-time member of Feltmakers and until recently on the Feltmakers Ireland Committee, is a woman with many talents. In addition to feltmaking, Dee works in ceramics, weaving, metalwork, printmaking, plaster castings, knitting and horticulture. Her focus now is on automata – creating sculptures that can move.

So Much to See

Dee brought many art pieces along with her to display and explained the process of creating each piece with passion and precision. A few ‘stand out’ pieces included a ceramic likeness of St. Brigid, which she exhibited with the Liberties Weavers; Dee incorporated felting and weaving into the work. Another was her automata piece of ‘The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly’; here, she created a wind-up toy with gears, causing the old woman to swallow the various characters named in the well-known poem. Finally, her wet felted seagulls illustrated ‘the magic’ of wool; Dee said, “It’s an amazing thing to use sheep fur to create felted art”.

Feltmakers Ireland can’t wait to see what Dee will do next!

“Try out everything because it’s fun … and you have something in the end” – one of the many encouraging words from Dee.

More Work

Ceramic Tiles made by casting from plants.
Jack-in-the-box Automata
Sculptural Portrait Heads of Dee’s children
These Shoes are Carved from Mahogony Wood!

Some of Dee’s sculptures can be found at the Kildare Gallery – https://thekildaregallery.ie/product-category/sculpture/deirdre-crofts/

Additionally, she exhibits each year at the sculpture installation at Bloom in Phoenix Park- https://www.bordbiabloom.com/sculpture-in-the-park/

In previous years, she exhibited at Sculpture in Context at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin. (It is currently on hiatus but will hopefully return this year). https://sculptureincontext.ie/

Video of Dee’s Talk

Lastly, an unedited video of Deirdre Crofts’ talk with us is on our YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/@feltmakersireland

Sincere apologies in advance for the dodgy camerawork and sound. https://youtu.be/N0S3FjGK2Io


Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.

Exhibition: ‘Symbols of Ireland’ – Annual Feltmakers Ireland Show – Phoenix Park Visitor Centre

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland
Poster for Feltmakers Ireland's annual exhibition - 2025 - 'Symbols of Ireland' at the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre. Sabina Higgins will launch show on the 2nd of March at 3 PM. The SHow runs Wednesdays through Sundays, from the 5th to the 30th of March.
The Poster for Feltmakers Ireland’s group exhibition in March.

Feltmakers Ireland is delighted to present ‘Symbols of Ireland’, a group exhibition celebrating the country’s rich cultural heritage through the art of felt. Sabina Higgins will officially launch* the exhibition on Sunday, the 2nd of March, at 3 PM.

This showcase explores Ireland’s iconic imagery and deep-rooted traditions through the versatile medium of wool—ranging from imported Merino fibre to locally raised Irish wool. Featuring an array of techniques, including wet felting and needle felting, members of Feltmakers Ireland have created striking three-dimensional sculptures, wall art, and wearable pieces, each offering a unique interpretation of Irish symbolism.

The exhibition runs from Wednesday, the 5th of March, to Sunday, the 30th of March 30th, 2025, at the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre Gallery. Please note: the Centre is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. (This may change if there is an increase in staffing. We will know more by the middle of the month).

The gallery is conveniently accessible by Dublin Bus number 99 and is located within the historic Phoenix Park. For further details, including maps and directions to the park, visit https://www.phoenixpark.ie/directions.

The artwork featured on the exhibition poster is ‘Brigid’s Legacy’ by Jane Fox.

*Provisional upon her schedule.

Feltmakers Ireland is a guild member of the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland (DCCI).

Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.

Sunday Session

Sunday Session: Deirdre Crofts Creative Journey this Sunday

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland
Deirdre Crofts - Sunday Session, the 9th of February
Photo of Deirdre Crofts at the January Sunday Session- Leiko Uchiyama’s Pine Needle Felt Workshop. (Apologies to Jane Fox and Fiona Leech, who have been cropped out of the picture).

On Sunday, the 9th of February, Feltmakers Ireland guild member Deirdre Crofts will share her creative journey with us during our Sunday Session. In addition to feltmaking, Dee works in ceramics, weaving, and horticulture. She is particularly interested in automata – creating sculptures that can move!

On the left is Deirdre’s piece from the ‘Building Bridges’ exhibition, 2022, and on the right, the artist and her piece from the ‘Bountiful’ exhibition in 2023

There is a ‘Meet the Maker’ interview with Deirdre from 2020 – https://feltmakersireland.com/2020/08/30/meet-the-maker-deirdre-crofts/

Deirdre Crofts piece from the Endangered Exhibition
Deirdre’s piece from the ‘Endangered’ exhibition in 2020

Additional Details

Complimentary tea and coffee will be served at this Sunday’s Session. Home-baked goods to share are always welcome! If you can, please bring a travel mug to replace the use of disposable paper cups.

As a member perk for 2025, we will no longer charge 5 euros per session. (If you still need to renew your Annual Membership for 2025, you can now pay online here – https://feltmakersireland.com/membership-application/ )

This Sunday’s Session will have a Zoom link, and we hope to record Deirdre’s presentation. The Zoom link will be mailed to members today, Friday, the 7th of February.

As this is the season of coughs and sneezes, we would prefer if you do not share these. Please do not attend if you may be unwell.


Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.

Sunday Session

Sunday Session: Creative Journey of Deirdre Crofts – the 9th of February

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland
Photo of Deirdre Crofts at the January Sunday Session- Leiko Uchiyama’s Pine Needle Felt Workshop. (Apologies to Jane Fox and Fiona Leech, who have been cropped out of the picture).

On Sunday, the 9th of February, Feltmakers Ireland guild member Deirdre Crofts will share her creative journey with us during our Sunday Session. In addition to feltmaking, Dee works in ceramics, weaving, and horticulture. She is particularly interested in automata – creating sculptures that can move!

Her piece from the 2020 exhibition, ‘Endangered’
Deirdre’s piece from the ‘Building Bridges’ exhibition, 2022
Deirdre with her piece from the ‘Bountiful’ exhibition, 2023
  • When: 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM

There is a ‘Meet the Maker’ interview with Deirdre from 2020 – https://feltmakersireland.com/2020/08/30/meet-the-maker-deirdre-crofts/

Additional Details

Complimentary tea and coffee will be served at this Sunday’s Session. Home-baked goods to share are always welcome! If you can, please bring a travel mug to replace the use of disposable paper cups.

As a member perk for 2025, we will no longer charge 5 euros per session. (If you still need to renew your Annual Membership for 2025, you can now pay online here – https://feltmakersireland.com/membership-application/ )

This Sunday’s Session will have a Zoom link, and we hope to record Deirdre’s presentation. The Zoom link will be mailed to members on the Friday preceding the event.

As this is the season of coughs and sneezes, we would prefer if you do not share these. Please do not attend if you may be unwell.

Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.

Exhibition: Lenore Tawney & Toshiko Takaezu – London – Show Closes Saturday

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland
Lenore Tawney & Toshiko Takaezu: A Remarkable Friendship - photograph of installation in gallery.

We’re sorry for posting this one at the last minute, as it closes on Saturday, but this art exhibition looks inspiring. Online sources are filled with excellent pictures and information if you cannot instantly travel to London in Dr Who’s TARDIS.

The Alison Jacques Gallery presents ‘Lenore Tawney & Toshiko Takaezu: A Remarkable Friendship’, which is a two-person exhibition dedicated to the work and 50-year friendship of Lenore Tawney (1907-2007) and Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011).

According to Tawney’s website, her “career as an artist did not begin in earnest until the age of fifty.”

For more information, see the gallery’s website – https://alisonjacques.com/exhibitions/lenore-tawney-toshiko-takaezua-remarkable-friendship

Lenore Tawney’s website – https://lenoretawney.org/

If you cannot make it to the show, textile artist Kim Winter has an excellent review post with many photographs of the installation in the gallery! https://kimwinter.co.uk/2025/01/09/lenore-tawney-toshiko-takaezu-a-remarkable-friendship

Kim is a former feltmaker, who now focuses on basketry. She has a long-running and informative blog that is worth following.

Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.

2 Exhibitions: Olga de Amaral & Chiharu Shiota Shows – Paris

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland

Travelling to Paris this winter? Two art exhibitions may be of interest.

Olga de Amaral Exhibition

Olga de Amaral poster for exhibition

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain hosts the first significant European retrospective of Olga de Amaral, a pivotal artist in the Colombian art scene and Fibre Art movement. The exhibition features nearly 80 works from the 1960s to the present, including many pieces never before exhibited outside Colombia. In addition to the artist’s celebrated gold leaf creations, the showcase highlights her early textile experiments and monumental works.

The exhibition runs until the 16th of March, 2025.

On the Foundation’s Instagram, there are several interviews about de Amaral’s work with the curator, Marie Perennès – https://www.instagram.com/fondationcartier/

For more information, visit the Foundation’s website – https://www.fondationcartier.com/en/exhibitions/olga-de-amaral

Chiharu Shiota Exhibition

Chiaru Shiota poster for exhibition

Chiharu Shiota is internationally celebrated for her monumental installations crafted from intricate networks of interwoven wool threads. These expansive creations often incorporate everyday objects, immersing viewers in a majestic, dreamlike journey.

Jointly organized with the Grand Palais and Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, this exhibition is the most extensive presentation of Shiota’s work ever held in France. Spanning over 1,200 square meters, it provides an immersive sensory experience. The exhibition offers a comprehensive exploration of Shiota’s artistic journey, which has evolved over two decades. It features seven large-scale installations, including sculptures, photographs, drawings, performance videos, and archival materials related to her staging projects.

The show runs until the 19th of March, 2025.

For more information, visit the Grand Palace website – https://www.grandpalais.fr/fr/evenement/chiharu-shiota

Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.

Reminder: Golden Fleece Award Application Deadline is Friday

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland

The mission of the Golden Fleece Award is to provide resources for practising contemporary visual artists and makers to innovate and develop their artistic vision. In the previous year, only 20% of the applications received for the Golden Fleece Award were made by craft practitioners. Let’s change that this year!

The annual award supports artists working in all forms of visual, craft and applied arts at critical junctures of their careers. Applicants should reside in, or originally from, the island of Ireland.

Two €10,000 awards will be made in 2025, one in each of the two categories: Visual Art and Craft + Applied Art.

The submission deadline is 5pm on Friday, the 29th of November, 2024.

Note: Just over 240 applications were received for the 2024 Golden Fleece Award – 197 for Category 1: Visual Art and 45 for Category 2: Craft + Applied Art! (This is a much smaller number than applicants to the Arts Council of Ireland’s Agility Award. According to their Twitter/X, “We received a record number of 3,279 applications for our 2024 Agility Award”). 

One can also read the past Golden Fleece Award applications to understand the judging better.

For more information, visit the Golden Fleece Award’s website – https://www.goldenfleeceaward.com/

Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.

Exhibition: Fibre Art Exhibition at the Renwick Gallery – Washington, DC USA

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland

The artists featured in ‘Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women’ transformed everyday materials like cotton, felt, and wool into deeply expressive, personal creations. This exhibition offers an alternative perspective on twentieth-century American art, spotlighting the work of artists including Adela Akers, Neda Al-Hilali, Emma Amos, Lia Cook, Olga de Amaral, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, Sheila Hicks, Agueda Martínez, Faith Ringgold, Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Scott, Judith Scott, Kay Sekimachi, Lenore Tawney, Katherine Westphal, Claire Zeisler, and Marguerite Zorach. These artists express their visions through sewn quilts, woven tapestries and rugs, intricate beadwork and embroidery, twisted and bound sculptures, and mixed-media assemblages.

If one cannot travel to the show, an accompanying audio program on the website delves into ten powerful backstories, enriching the experience of the displayed artworks. In addition, there is an online gallery, which links to over thirty pieces, and a short accompanying bio for each artist.

Where: The Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, USA.

When: The exhibition runs until the 5th of January, 2025.

For more information, visit the museum’s website – https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/fiber-art-by-women

Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.

Of Interest: Katrin Thorvaldsdottir’s Sculpture from Seaweed

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland

Not feltmaking, but of interest concerning sustainability and textiles: For over two decades, Katrín Þorvaldsdóttir (Thorvaldsdottir) has conducted her own research and experiments to learn how to preserve seaweed as a material to use in art and design.

Working with seaweed is a craft, she says. “It is not ‘just take this and design out of the blue’. You have to know the material, you have to listen to the material, so it takes time.”

Katrin Thorvaldsdottir via Guardian article.

To learn more, visit her website – https://katrinthorvaldsdottir.com/

Also, make sure to watch this lovely video about her – https://katrinthorvaldsdottir.com/film/

There is also an interview with her at the Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/nov/09/off-the-wrack-the-designer-using-seaweed-to-create-art-and-high-fashion

Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.

Exhibition: Marjolein Dallinga – Group Textile Art Show – NYC

Published on by Feltmakers Ireland

L’space Gallery, located in New York City, has a group exhibition, ‘Fibration: poking back‘, which shows the art of sixteen artists with fresh and compelling approaches to fibre and textile art. Artist and feltmaker Marjolein Dallinga has work in the show.

Here is a list of all of the artists with artwork in the exhibition: Holly Ballard Martz | Mona Bozorgi | Martin Casuso | Marjolein Dallinga | Marina Font | Lauren Gregory | Marik Lechner | Tasha Lewis | Kayla Mattes | Nico Mazza | Rosemary Meza-DesPlas | Elisa Ortega Montilla | Jennifer Pettus | Katarina Riesing | Erin M. Riley | Alicia Ross

The show runs until the 26th of October.

To learn more about the show and see photographs, visit the gallery’s website – https://www.lspacegallery.com/fibration-poking-back-2024.html

There is a video from the show on the gallery’s Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/p/DABnZBZPoht/

Disclaimer for Feltmakers Ireland Blog

Feltmakers Ireland aims to share information about awards, education, events, exhibitions, and opportunities that you will find interesting. Our sharing is neither paid for by nor an endorsement of these individuals or organisations.

Contact Us: If you have any concerns about content, please email us at feltmakersie@gmail.com.

Questions: For questions about content, please follow the link to the organisation involved in hosting the event.