Charm Quilt by Sophie Ballantyne

Dilana presents ‘Charm Quilt’, a 144cm x 178cm rug by Sophie Ballantyne, who is interning with us in our Christchurch workshop. 

Ballantyne is both a painter, designer and rug-maker; a combination of interests that saw an atypical model of creation for Dilana in this rug; Ballantyne designed, tufted, and finished the rug in a singular process.

If you’ve ever had the chance to enter the Dilana workshop you’ll know about the yarn wall, the roof-to-floor cubby holes stuffed full of hundreds of spools of yarn, sorted into various colour groups. But there’s also a haberdashery-like collection of boxes not on display, the leftover yarn from decades of Dilana’s rug-making history. Colours without matches, fragments from past creations, half-empty spools. It was this backroom collection of scraps that Ballantyne was drawn to (and then drew upon) when she started her internship. This quilt-graveyard became the catalyst for the creation of ‘Charm Quilt’, which looked at textile histories involving scraps and compilations.

Ballantyne was interested in the function of quilting as a historic way to repurpose fabric scraps, a process that imbues objects with notions of history, labour and community. This tradition was drawn upon to make ‘Charm Quilt’, whose title references a style of quilting made from scraps that were often collected and accumulated from peers.

The result is ‘Charm Quilt’, a pieced-together of the parts of Dilana’s history mixed in with Ballantyne’s signature practice exploring pattern design, textile histories and tumultuous colour.

Compositions in the Jar | Richard Killeen

Hang in any order. 

Hang in any group.

This was the instruction from the artist for his first cut-out work exhibited in ” across the pacific 1978”

Collection from a Japanese garden 1937 -
1978

Once shapes are liberated from the surface of canvas or a board, they become objects or things. 

A composition can be defined as a grouping of objects that have a distinct relationship with their audience or with their neighboring shapes.

We all collect "things", whether they be insects, notes, or buttons . We frame them by placing them in jars. Contains. The jar of a beloved insect lying on the corner of the library, creating a composition with its surrendering "thing".

Killeen's objects and forms, the jars of insects and moths, invites the  opportunity to compose our own compositions within our own environment, be it  a floor or wall.  

An age-old dye method key for contemporary rug making

Eclipse by Bridget Bidwill

Eclipse 200 by 300cm

Bridget's work emcompasses both European traditional and modernist painting technique. Finding a suitable method to express this in a textile rug medium proved challenging

Work on paper / bridget bidwill

Simply dying  a few shades of wool yarn and attempting to blend them would not convey the true aesthetic of Bridget's signature style. Instead, we introduced an ancient method of dying (abrash) where hand spun yarns were on purpose, dye unevenly.

This carries through to the surface tones of the pile creating subtle and organic variations

Abrash dye method

Dilana's translation of Bridget's work into a textile captures the essence of her painting technique and soft colour tones. 

Eclipse 200cm by 300cm