Anna Torma: Primitive Stitch Work that Tells a Story

As someone who likes fiber art, enjoys stitch work and buys fiber art books for the Central Library Art collection, I'm always looking for new fiber artists. While researching I came across this artist, Anna Torma.


 She blends together her love of primitive art and children's storytelling together to create these colorful works.  Her work is so energetic and happy. They almost look like children's drawings. Her colors are vibrant. While reading about her I leaned she does indeed  use the drawings and stories of her children to create many of her works.


Torma was born in 1952, Tarnaors, Hungary. She leaned how to sew, knit, crochet, and embroider from her mother and grandmothers. Her interest in working with textiles goes back to early childhood when she learned to sew, knit, crochet and embroider from her mother and grandmothers. Torma graduated with a degree in Textile Art and Design from the Hungarian University of Applied Arts, Budapest, Hungary, where she studied from 1974-79. Since then she has been exhibiting her large scale hand embroidered wall hangings. 


Let's hope she publishes a book of her work. Until then you can view her new work called Bagatelles here at Selvedge Magazine.


More of Anna's work.

Alexis Arnold: Crystallized Books

Came across this yesterday. Sculptor and installation artist Alexis Arnold explores the visual manifestations of time and memory upon objects. Using Borax crystals and paperback books, Arnold transforms ordinary reading material into beautiful and mysterious masses of mineral matter. She says, "The crystal growth highlights or creates the aesthetics of these once-utilitarian objects that are entering the world of obsolescence, as well as acts to suggest past narratives and post-human futures laden with nostalgia, wonder, and the interminable progression of time."
More about her work here.

Fiber Artist Yulie Urano

I just came across this fiber artist, Yulie Urano in American Craft magazine. her creations are made from yarn into thick long colorful ropes. With her self made ropes she creates knitwear unlike traditional knitwear.

Urano was raised in Kansas City to Japanese born parents. She comes from a background of women who worked with fibers. Her grandmothers were kimono makers and indigo shibori dryers and her mother sewed toys and clothes for her family. Urano started out as a sociology major and soon switched to studio art. It was at the University of Colorado where she really began to discover the interest she had for fiber arts. Soon she was completing an art program at Kansas City Art Institutes fiber arts programs.

The fibers she works with are very large and there are no needles available for her to knit with. Urano's needles are her hands and she knits her works right onto her body.  She is well known for her signature cowlneck sweaters.

Urano also uses her Japanese heritage to create felted wool creatures inspired by Japanese Kawaii, which means cute.

Read more about Urano at American Craft.