The threads of time: 5 Amazing artists using yarn

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Spinning fiber into yarn is such an ancient art that its origins are lost in the mists of time. The oldest recovered artifacts made with yarn are string skirts that date from up to 20,000 years ago. The craft is steeped in history and tradition. When a contemporary textile artist chooses to work in yarn the results can be breathtaking.

In this article, part of our Discover… series, we introduce you to 5 incredible artists who are prepared to challenge our preconceptions by bringing yarn firmly into the 21st century.

Lindsay Obermeyer

Lindsay Obermeyer

Lindsay Obermeyer is an artist, designer, author and educator with a passion for the textile arts. For twenty five years, she’s been exhibiting her work in galleries and museums around the world. Lindsay’s art is in the permanent collections of Sweden’s National Public Art Council, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Racine Art Museum among others.

Lindsay says “I am fascinated with patterns in all forms. I listen for repeats in music as it plays on the radio. I look for the single motif in a complex cloth.”

Her creations in yarn cover an assortment of global issues including our fragile ecosystem and have a bold, pertinent voice.

For more information visit: www.lbostudio.com

Patricia Waller

Patricia Waller

Patricia Waller is a textile artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her work often depicts characters associated with childhood giving them a macabre twist, exploiting the yarn to it’s full artistic potencial. We are confronted with clowns, monkeys and a range familiar cartoon charaters in unfamiliar situations. The yarn creates a comical narrative but beware it’s sinister after taste! She currently has exhibitions at the Deschler Gallery, Berlin, and Tobias Schrade Gallery, Ulm, Germany.

For more information visit: www.patriciawaller.com

Dave Cole

Dave Cole

Dave Cole is an American contemporary visual artist specialising in sculpture. His work is characterised by an interest in politics, patriotism, nostalgia, and masculinity. Dave lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. His combined passion for yarn and sculpture have given him the freedom to push bounderies and create an astonishing and arresting body of work

For more information visit: www.davecoledavecole.com

Tatyana Yanishevsky

Tatyana Yanishevsky

Tatyana is an artist and technologist also living in Providence, Rhode Island. Her practice includes knitting, building structures out of steel, sewing and embroidering, making rubber molds, casting resin, building circuits, collecting small dead animals, working on her house, and thinking by the woodstove.

Tatyana also works as an environmental consultant and often travels abroad. Her passion for nature and the outdoors is evident in her intricate designs and the yarn becomes a delicate thread in which her flowers and plantlife bloom.

For more information visit: www.knitplants.com

R. John Mertens

R. John Mertens

R. John Mertens is an artist and recording engineer. His interests combine post-modernism, post-minimalism, post-structuralism and the post-apocalypse. His work is characterised as sound, fiber, performance installations; which function to question forms of pedagogy, interaction, folklore, historicity, and contemporary craft.

He has shown nationally and internationally with recent exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland OR and Scythia Arts Center in Kherson, Ukraine.

For more information visit: www.robertmertensartist.com

Want to shout about your favourite yarn artist? Tell us about them in the comments section below.