Fiber art is fine art made from natural or synthetic fibers and other materials such as fabric or yarn. It emphasizes the materials and the artist’s manual labor as part of the work’s significance, and elevates aesthetic value over practicality.
History of Fiber art
Following WWII, curators and art historians coined the term “fiber art” to describe the work of the artist-craftsman. During those years, there was a significant increase in the creation and manufacture of “art fabric.” As the contributions of craft artists were recognized, not just in fiber but also in clay and other media, an increasing number of weavers began tying fibers into nonfunctional forms as works of art in the 1950s.
The 1960s and 1970s saw an international fiber art revolution. Fiber structures were formed in addition to weaving via knotting, twining, plaiting, coiling, pleating, lashing, and interlacing. Because of the traditional association of women with textiles in the domestic sphere, artists in the United States and Europe explored the qualities of fabric to create works that could be hung or free standing, “two or three dimensional, flat or volumetric, many stories high or miniature, nonobjective or figurative, and representational or fantasy.”
Fiber work has become increasingly conceptual during the 1980s, influenced by postmodernist notions. For fiber artists, this meant “a new focus on creating work that confronted cultural issues such as: gender feminism; domesticity and the repetitive tasks related to women’s work; politics; the social and behavioral sciences; material specific concepts related to fiber’s softness, permeability, drapability, and so on.”
Modern Fiber art
Modern fiber art is rooted in the textile arts, which have been practiced for millennia around the world. Traditionally, fiber is derived from plants or animals, such as cotton from cotton seed pods, linen from flax stems, wool from sheep hair, or silk from silkworm cocoons. Synthetic materials, such as plastic acrylic, are increasingly employed in addition to these conventional materials.
To be turned into cloth or clothing, the fiber must be spun (or twisted) into a strand known as yarn. When the yarn is finished and dyed, it can be converted into cloth in a variety of methods. Knitting and crocheting are popular techniques for twisting and shaping yarn into clothes or fabric. Weaving is the most common way yarn is used to manufacture textiles. In weaving, the yarn is wrapped around a loom frame and drawn taut vertically. This is referred to as the warp. Then, working back and forth, another strand of yarn is wrapped over and under the warp. This wrapped yarn is called the weft. Most art and commercial textiles are made by this process.
For ages, weaving has been the primary method of producing clothing. Weaving forms are used to represent social standing in several civilizations. The higher the prestige, the more elaborate the weaving. Certain symbols and colors were also used to identify class and position. In the ancient Incan civilisation, for example, black and white motifs denoted military status.
