Artist
Statement
Heather Aspinall is a
textile artist with a lifelong passion for the drape, shine &
texture of textiles. She is also passionate about the millennia-long
tradition of textiles, and feels deeply that she is a small contributor
to the way in which women have expressed themselves artistically over
the centuries. She loves the way textiles are truly art for the body to
wear, art in the third dimension, personal, meaningful, moving and
evocative.
She's
inspired by anything
that evokes memory and a sense of the universals in humanity - history,
nature, the universe, fairy tales & mythology. Heather is
particularly influenced by historic costume and illustrators from the
golden period of children's book illustration at the turn of the 19th
to the 20th century and her work reflects a fascination with historic
detail and a pre-modern aesthetic.
Heather
loves to experiment
with natural fibres and fine art techniques to produce unique,
well-made and beautiful works of wearable art.
She lives
with her husband
and son in an old worker's cottage in a Canberra heritage area, her
studio nestled amongst the old orchard trees in her
cottage garden.
Qualifications
& Experience
It seems that Heather has
always been playing with fabrics and designing since she was a small
child. As a teenager this became a fascination with sewing and crafts,
particularly historic crafts such as tambour embroidery, and she
completed her final year art project in theatrical design in high
school. Her projects have always had an other-worldly quality and you
can see this imaginative aspect in her current work. Since graduating
from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Arts with
Honours in the History of Art, Heather has learned many skills in the
textile arts through workshops and other courses - shibori and other
dye-techniques, free-machine embroidery, creative & art-quilt
techniques, costume design, learning from and being inspired by some of
the most talented artists in the textile world; Kirry Toose,
Carol
Wilkes, Julie
Ryder, Bonnie Begg, Joan
James, Ana
Lisa Hedstrom and Sandy
Webster. She has shown her
wearable art at Australia's
Fashion Fantasia wearable art
parade, exhibited with Craft
ACT,
The ACT
Textile Arts Association and the
Majura
Women's Group, as well as giving
something back to the vibrant textiles community through her work on
the committees of the ACT Textile Arts Association and the Majura
Women's Group.
Resumé
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Heather modelling her wearable
art,
'Rosewater Swirl'
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