Cloth Paper Scissors

Boro series: old Japanese envelopes, hand painted rice papers

piece of vintage Boro fabric, Srithreads.com

Decades ago, impoverished farmers and fishermen in Japan and their families stitched and layered scraps of fabric for their survival. Boro (rags and tatters) was the shape of survival in their poverty and inhospitable land. The beauty and sheer compositional skill of these boro creations have become national treasures in Japan. Today, there are many artists working with fabric and cloth in similar ways.

Yuko Kimura: Boro no. 4, intaglio, old Japanese book page, on handmade paper, thread

Yuko Kimura is a California artist working with fabric, paper and thread. She has worked on a series titled Boro. Website here.

Yuko Kimura: Paper Window series: etching on old book pages and handmade paper, thread

"My working process is about mending and patching by reusing or recycling old paper or fabric from Japan. I am particularly interested in the beauty of translucency and imperfect uneven edges in homemade paper." -- Yuko Kimura

Matthew Harris: dyed, cut and handstitched cloth

Matthew Harris is a working artist with cloth, paper, thread in the United Kingdom. He makes work that employs dying, cutting and hand stitching. He is concerned with abstract imagery and the translation of drawn marks into cloth. Website here.

Michael Harris: mixed media on paper, waxed thread

"The musicality in Harris' work is clear. We can recognize the complex structural elements of composition... The progressive form of the [musical] score graphically represents the linear unfolding of time..." Paul Harper, Trace Elements

Lisa Hochstein:  salvaged paper

Lisa Hochstein spent several years living in Barcelona Spain and now lives in California.  She works with both salvaged papers and recycled fabric.  Website here.  

Lisa Hochstein:  hand stitching on salvaged fabric

"Each collage is a layered physical record of its own making,  as well as an encounter with the impermanence of objects we at one time hold dear and then later cease to value.  The finished works range from precise geometric constructions to more fluid, painterly compositions.  They resonate with my own intermittent pangs of nostalgia and fuel my curiosity about individual and collective histories."  -- Lisa Hochstein

Dorothy Caldwell:  fabric, stitching

Dorothy Caldwell is a Canadian textile artist.  She maintains an active international exhibition and teaching schedule from her studio in Hastings, Ontario.  Working with paper and cloth, her works examine different kinds of marks including stitching, resist and batik, drawn and painted marks and mending.  Her works address different aspects of movement and gesture that through time and repetition evolve into richly activated surfaces.  Website here.  

The art of the inner work, which unlike the outer
does not forsake the artist, which he does not "do"
and can only "be," springs from the depths of which
the day knows nothing. --Eugene Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery