Thesis (MTech (Fashion Design))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2009. / The focus of the Fibre-Arts Design Project (FADP) was to address issues of ageism in South Africa, particularly focusing on addressing the elderly's socio-economic well-being in Cape Town. This was achieved through the creation and implementation of a socially designed programme that was specifically aimed at empowering the elderly through the implementation of craft skills-training, as well as through the development and fabrication of a marketable women's accessory range. The FADP, which is a socially driven, income-generating model, improved the elderly's craft skills and revived hands-on creativity, as well as preserved and restored some of the elderly's disused and forgotten traditional craft skills and techniques. The success of the FADP is also attributed largely to its investment in people, whilst simultaneously and actively promoting strategies of knowledge and skills creation as a preferred and viable path to sustaining a community's creative and economic life. This is an important aspect when implementing social design programmes amongst similar particular disadvantaged communities and ensuring their sustainability.

Textiles may be used as a vehicle to penetrate and exemplify a society's customs and traditions. This dissertation concentrates on the Kuba cloths from Zaire and particularly focuses on the social and political implications associated with these textiles. Part One explores the economic aspects of the cloths and the values of work, wealth, status and titleholding among the Kuba. The Kuba's aesthetic preference for pattern and design will be contemplated in relation to the cloths and as an illustration of this culture's concern with decoration and display. Part Two of this study examines the occasions for which these cloths are adorned. It will be observed that these celebrations and rituals, in conjunction with their ceremonial modes of dress, not only underline the importance of the nation and its ideologies and customs (as examined in Part One) but serve to acknowledge ethnic identity, as well as maintain and perpetuate the social and political order of the Kuba. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (History of Art)

Textiles may be used as a vehicle to penetrate and exemplify a society's customs and traditions. This dissertation concentrates on the Kuba cloths from Zaire and particularly focuses on the social and political implications associated with these textiles. Part One explores the economic aspects of the cloths and the values of work, wealth, status and titleholding among the Kuba. The Kuba's aesthetic preference for pattern and design will be contemplated in relation to the cloths and as an illustration of this culture's concern with decoration and display. Part Two of this study examines the occasions for which these cloths are adorned. It will be observed that these celebrations and rituals, in conjunction with their ceremonial modes of dress, not only underline the importance of the nation and its ideologies and customs (as examined in Part One) but serve to acknowledge ethnic identity, as well as maintain and perpetuate the social and political order of the Kuba. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (History of Art)

This dissertation reframes the history eighteenth-century British art as a history of textiles. Women across England, Ireland, and Scotland grew, dressed, spun, and wove the hemp, flax, and wool textiles that were the basis for both the cultural implements and practical tools of empire: oil paintings on linen canvas and needlework of worsted thread hung in metropolitan exhibition spaces, while hemp rope, sail cloth, and coarse linen facilitated Britain’s global reach and transportation of commodities. Over the course of three chapters, “Rope,” “Linen,” and “Thread,” I demonstrate how ordinary textiles made and used by women were key tools for the funding, making, and aesthetics of art. In the first chapter, “Rope,” I trace the labor of female models in British drawing academies through their poses supported by rope, and consider historical encounters between rope and the female working body in carceral contexts. Following the entwined forms of life models and rope demonstrates just how entangled the spaces of punishment and the life studio were. The second chapter, “Linen,” is about the structure, materiality and hidden histories embedded in linen painting canvas. First, by comparing linen weaves, thread counts, stamps, and fiber content, I demonstrate the material connections between the world of coarse linen goods and the textile supports of oil paintings. I then argue that the texture of canvas was crucial to the “unfinished” aesthetic of portraiture that became fashionable in the late eighteenth century and attend to the racialized and gendered discourses intrinsic to this painting style. The last chapter, “Thread,” examines spinning and needlework as elite performances of female industry against the backdrop of mechanization, nascent labor movements, and imperial expansion. I contend that these conflicts played out in romanticized depictions of women spinning and the celebration of public exhibitions of worsted embroidery, namely Mary Linwood’s Gallery. While scholars from the fields of economic history, material culture, and art history have considered the topics of industrialization, labor, textiles, and art separately, this is the first study to bring them together as an intervention in eighteenth-century British art history. By rendering textile labor visible in eighteenth-century British art, I argue that manufacturing, imperialism and the visual arts were financially, materially, and ideologically enmeshed processes.

Dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master's Degree in Technology: Fine Art (Sculpture), Durban Institute of Technology, 2002. / Cloth bead sculptures are art objects made by female artists from cloth, beads, wood, wire and other materials that are stitched by hand. They are freestanding representations of the human figure, animals and inanimate objects and have traditionally been important ritual, as well as aesthetic, objects in Zulu communal life. The research for this dissertation was based on qualitative methods which brought together information from the women discussing their life and work. These discussions with individuals and groups looked at the women's own explanations of their work, including its traditional, ritual and communicative functions in rural Kwa Zulu Natal. They also discussed their experiences in selling their artwork in relation to the past discriminatory practices of apartheid South Africa, which was the context for their lives. From the 1970s some rural women brought some of these figures to Durban for sale in the streets to supplement their meagre resources. Later the African Art Centre became the main retail outlet for selling African Art and Craft and white people associated with it became the 'official' spokespersons and interpreters of such their art work. This had the consequence of depriving the rural women artists of their own voice. They were thus not able to give their own interpretation and explanation of their work. Interpretation of these sculptures in the dissertation has taken into account the traditional communicative role of bead figures and the symbolic function of colours, patterns and textures created by the beads and other materials. Cloth bead figures brought in for sale to local and international buyers always represented more than simple decorated figures to the artists themselves. Indeed these bead figures, like other works of art produced by black South Africans, became a vehicle for the / M

Este trabalho enfatiza o universo feminino em seu desenvolvimento. Seu título, \"Legado\" refere-se a uma obra plástica, que ao ser composta juntamente à tese, passou a ser vista como objeto de estudo da pesquisa, em uma investigação sobre a influência e a utilização de elementos da produção têxtil artesanal nas artes visuais, no final do século XX e início do XXI, por alguns artistas brasileiros. Dentre as leituras que foram desenvolvidas durante a investigação, a primeira volta-se para a Semiótica Planar, de Greimas, priorizando a estrutura física de \"Legado\" enquanto obra que insere o trabalho têxtil artesanal como produto da pesquisa. Trabalha a intertextualidade de maneira que aborde a contextualização de trabalhos plásticos, buscando suas origens culturais e simbólicas. O enfoque é dado para uma projeção do universo feminino nos lares, na tradição oral, no artesanato brasileiro,os quais também estão projetados sobre a produção das artes visuais no Brasil. O artesanal, alterando sua função utilitária para a estética, em uma reflexão do fazer humano. Para uma compreensão de \"Legado\", é proposto um diálogo com outras obras da mesma artista e pesquisadora, no qual elementos compositivos são observados e estudados no seu processo de criação. Integrando todo o trabalho, um \"jogo\" de figuras é proposto, de maneira a sugerir a própria estrutura da colcha de retalhos tramada com os conteúdos propostos no texto. A utilização do fio, da costura, do bordado, da trama, é apresentada como algo cíclico, que responde à essência humana e feminina de expressar-se no artesanal, remetendo a necessidades primordiais de fertilidade, feminilidade e propagação, seja no século XXI ou XV. / This study emphasizes forms of expression and values concerning the feminine universe. Its title, \"Legado\" (Legacy) refers to the plastic work which was composed along with this thesis and, for this reason, can be seen as the central object of this research - an investigation about the influence and use of elements of textile craft into the visual arts, by Brazilian artists, at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. The first part is anchored in the Plan Semiotics, developed by A.J. Greimas, as a theoretical basis for the analysis of the physical structure of \"Legado\", a work which inserts textile craft as the product of this research. The second part focuses intertextuality, under the point of view of the plastic works contexts, in search of their cultural and symbolic origins. A projection of the feminine universe in the domestic environments, in the oral traditions, in the Brazilian craftworks, all of them also projected onto the visual arts, is approached. The transformation of the utilitarian function of craftwork into an aesthetic function is developed, as a reflection on the human actions. In the third part, with the aim of assuring a better comprehension of \"Legado\", a dialogue with other works produced by its author and researcher is proposed. This way, composing elements are observed and studied in their process of creation. In conclusion of this study as a whole, a \"game\" of images is proposed, thus suggesting the particular patchwork\'s structure, plotted in accordance with the contents previously presented in the text. The use of needle and thread, of sewing or embroidering, is seen as something cyclical, which corresponds to the human female essence of expressing herself through handmade craftworks, reminding primordial necessities of fertility and propagation, either in the 21st, in the 15th or in any other century.

Este trabalho enfatiza o universo feminino em seu desenvolvimento. Seu título, \"Legado\" refere-se a uma obra plástica, que ao ser composta juntamente à tese, passou a ser vista como objeto de estudo da pesquisa, em uma investigação sobre a influência e a utilização de elementos da produção têxtil artesanal nas artes visuais, no final do século XX e início do XXI, por alguns artistas brasileiros. Dentre as leituras que foram desenvolvidas durante a investigação, a primeira volta-se para a Semiótica Planar, de Greimas, priorizando a estrutura física de \"Legado\" enquanto obra que insere o trabalho têxtil artesanal como produto da pesquisa. Trabalha a intertextualidade de maneira que aborde a contextualização de trabalhos plásticos, buscando suas origens culturais e simbólicas. O enfoque é dado para uma projeção do universo feminino nos lares, na tradição oral, no artesanato brasileiro,os quais também estão projetados sobre a produção das artes visuais no Brasil. O artesanal, alterando sua função utilitária para a estética, em uma reflexão do fazer humano. Para uma compreensão de \"Legado\", é proposto um diálogo com outras obras da mesma artista e pesquisadora, no qual elementos compositivos são observados e estudados no seu processo de criação. Integrando todo o trabalho, um \"jogo\" de figuras é proposto, de maneira a sugerir a própria estrutura da colcha de retalhos tramada com os conteúdos propostos no texto. A utilização do fio, da costura, do bordado, da trama, é apresentada como algo cíclico, que responde à essência humana e feminina de expressar-se no artesanal, remetendo a necessidades primordiais de fertilidade, feminilidade e propagação, seja no século XXI ou XV. / This study emphasizes forms of expression and values concerning the feminine universe. Its title, \"Legado\" (Legacy) refers to the plastic work which was composed along with this thesis and, for this reason, can be seen as the central object of this research - an investigation about the influence and use of elements of textile craft into the visual arts, by Brazilian artists, at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. The first part is anchored in the Plan Semiotics, developed by A.J. Greimas, as a theoretical basis for the analysis of the physical structure of \"Legado\", a work which inserts textile craft as the product of this research. The second part focuses intertextuality, under the point of view of the plastic works contexts, in search of their cultural and symbolic origins. A projection of the feminine universe in the domestic environments, in the oral traditions, in the Brazilian craftworks, all of them also projected onto the visual arts, is approached. The transformation of the utilitarian function of craftwork into an aesthetic function is developed, as a reflection on the human actions. In the third part, with the aim of assuring a better comprehension of \"Legado\", a dialogue with other works produced by its author and researcher is proposed. This way, composing elements are observed and studied in their process of creation. In conclusion of this study as a whole, a \"game\" of images is proposed, thus suggesting the particular patchwork\'s structure, plotted in accordance with the contents previously presented in the text. The use of needle and thread, of sewing or embroidering, is seen as something cyclical, which corresponds to the human female essence of expressing herself through handmade craftworks, reminding primordial necessities of fertility and propagation, either in the 21st, in the 15th or in any other century.

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Certain disjunctions exist between the structure, courses, and practices of current textile curricula on the one hand, and the demands of students for entry into diverse creative professions and the demands of the creative industry for qualified new talents on the other. Thus, this research will explore the history, current issues, and emerging trends of academia and the creative professions as these shape the qualifications, aspirations, and expectations of students, academia, and the textile-related fields. The ultimate goal of this study is to comprehend the contemporary issues—social, economic, and cultural shifts—that may impact textile education within art and design colleges, and propose an efficient and engaging BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) textile curriculum suitable for the era of interdisciplinary education and the fourth industrial revolution. Since scholarly study of the effectiveness of art school curriculum is limited and little research has examined the challenges of BFA education, and in particular BFA textile education in the context of 21st century college education, the researcher begins with a survey of existing literature from adjacent fields, including higher education, sociology, business, marketing, apparel, and art education, in particular, adolescent artistic development. The existing literature also includes statistics from government, consulting firms, colleges ranking sites, and annual reports published by each school. This qualitative case study examines how stakeholders in BFA textile education—students, faculty, and professionals—from five selected art colleges in the U.S. perceive their educational experiences and post-college careers. The data were collected through 1) a review of existing literature pertaining to perspectives of general college education, creative industry, and current student generation, and 2) qualitative data gathered through initial surveys and verbal interviews, including two pilot studies. Stakeholder perspectives obtained through interviews are interpreted through the following theoretical frameworks: 1) the business perspective aiming at the success of all stakeholders; 2) the marketing perspective aiming at improving stakeholder satisfaction as a means of enhancing the operational efficiency of organizations; and 3) the educational perspective aiming to create effective teaching and engaging learning environments for the success of today's young creative talents. The researcher contends that the findings strongly suggest curricular and pedagogy change in accordance with societal changes and demands of the stakeholders—current student generation, creative industry, and academia—while at the same time informing the significant value of college education, BFA education, and textile education in the 21st century.