Course descriptionPrinted cloth has long been used to commemorate events, communicate messages, and convey identity in political and personal arenas. In contemporary practice the process of direct painting, resist dyeing, hand printing, and silkscreening on cloth likewise leaves the mark of the maker's intent-transforming a plain surface to one saturated with color and imprinted with graphic content. As a flexible substrate, cloth offers unique opportunities for the artist or designer to communicate ideas, drape interior environments, and fashion the body. In these hands-on courses, students work with pigments, chemical dyes, and plant-based colors on a variety of fibers and fabrics. Courses rotate content by semester and year and include Saturated Cloth; Blue Prints; Tessellations to Toiles; and Engineered Prints.Advanced level students will follow the main structure of the course, using and building upon previously acquired skills. Advanced level students will meet regularly with the instructor to strengthen their conceptual inquiries, find critical contexts for their work, and develop their visual literacy within a contemporary art/design dialogue.Section DescriptionThough cloth is generally thought of as two-dimensional, this course explores the three-dimensional potential of textile structures to buckle, wrinkle, shrink, shrivel, and disintegrate. The inherent properties of cloth are altered with chemical and mechanical processes to create topographical surfaces. Devore (burn-out) on velvet introduces the dual vocabulary of transparency and opacity and fulling (felting) with wool initiates contraction and distortion. In addition, printing, dyeing, and engineering constructed prints will be explored. Many of these processes are not entirely predictable; therefore experimentation and improvisation are encouraged.

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