Iris Arad
We welcome this week’s featured artist in our virtual gallery, Iris Arad! Iris graduated from Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in 2012, having specialized in knitting. Already her fantastical creations have been exhibited in Israel and beyond, in solo and group shows. In October 2013 Iris won an Honorary Award at the Cheongju Interantional Craft Biennale in Korea. In 2013 she also participated in the Tel Aviv Art Museum & Shenkar “Avant-Garde” Dress Design Exhibition, and in the Heimtextile show in Frankfurt, Germany. Iris’s incredible “Royal Fantasy” series was born two years ago of a desire “to imagine and build a rich visual and colorful legend.” Each piece is a detailed neo-Elizabethan study, corresponding to a member of the court. The collection is a wonder of texture with regal poufs and tiers, marvelous collars and exquisite sleeves, sometimes solid and gorgeous, sometimes suggested via skeletal ropes of color. All together they make a deliriously elegant court. Come to our virtual gallery and see this oeuvre of fibrous finery, and more of Iris’s artwork!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maria Zverin
We are so proud to introduce the newest member of The Yarn Company team - Meet our international house designer, Maria Zverin! This Russian-born innovator has developed her own knitting methods, and has had her work shown at Tel Aviv Museum, in the Group Exhibition of Avant-Garde dresses, at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the several Fashion Shows.
Her fabrics vary in density and transparency due to the combinations of yarns and their differing qualities and colors---she often uses over a hundred different yarns in one project!
This in turn affects the ways one can wear the garments and move in them, and changes the visual impact, the way the body is seen.
She teaches textile design at Shenkar, in Israel ---lucky students, and lucky us! We will be unveiling her designs, exclusively for The Yarn Company slowly. Stay tuned for many more surprises and much more about Maria. She is also teaching the knitting course we are teaching at Shenkar. Read and see the progress of her studetns here. Meanwhile , read about our first Maria-designs, including the Stealth Cape, the Raven Sweater, the Opera Vest and Brooch, and the crocheted Meteor Necklace.
Shay Schneidermann
----------------------------
Our current Shenkar artist of the week is Shay Schneidermann, an Israeli from Kibbutz-Na and a third-year student in the Textile Design Department at Shenkar. Shay specializes in knitting (industrial and home machine, as well as hand-knitting); his passion is deconstructing existing fabrics and objects, then reconstructing them, combining the originals with his own “new textile knitted developments---to personalize objects and make them super personal as well as super cool.” The resulting unique designs are innovative and supercool indeed---for example, his knitted twin speakers made out of leather, cotton and chenille. And you should see the bicycle he yarn-bombed! His juxtaposition of industrially knitted fabrics and hand stitching is beyond stunning.
Shay also designs unique and gorgeous menswear.
This set is inspired by Lucian Freud’s painting “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping.” Come see these for real, and more of his work in our virtual gallery!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elinor Rozental- Shenkar Graduate
In Town? Drop by to see the unique jewelry of Elinor Rozental, who graduated as a Textile Designer and Illustrator from Shenkar in 2013. A very creative child, Elinor always knew she would grow up to be a designer. She followed her passion to the famous design college, and only later discovered her grandmother’s old design notebooks; her other grandmother was embroidering maps and tapestries that are still in use today.
Elinor is forever fascinated by the unlimited opportunities and variations that can come out of a material. “In my opinion,” she writes, “textile is the combination of shapes, colors and textures [into] a surface that can be used in all domains imaginable. . . . As a designer I focus on innovative technology and the need to be always up to date.” Come check out her creation---and be sure to keep up to date yourself on our rotating gallery roster.
Elinor feels that creating designs for specific people can make you as happy as the people themselves do---“amazing!” Detail oriented, she is “always in constant search for the perfect aesthetic. My inspiration comes from fashion, nature's elements and objects that [get] caught on my lenses on every day of life. When I design,” she says, “I focus on guiding principles such as saturation versus air[iness], amorphous and abstract images versus what the eye can easily recognize, and the principle of structure. [Blos do you know what she means by?: and how it is following all to pieces.]” Explaining her design process, Elinor says that she begins by selecting an interesting raw material or fabric that she printed; “then, since the knitting action actually changes its appearance and creates something new, I use the new look and still leave clues to the original material.”
During her studies at Shenkar, Elinor learned weaving, knitting, and silkscreen techniques. She also loves painting, photography and styling. Working as a stylist in designers’ shops ignited Elinor’s drive to create fashion accessories herself. She now works as a graphic designer and a freelance designer. “I believe, once we invest our personal creativity in a product, we receive a unique result with a personal seal.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sharon Katz- Shenkar Graduate
“There is something almost magical about fabrics and in the art of creating them,” writes Sharon Katz, a graduate of Shenkar. “For me, textile truly forms the base for everything that we see around us. To be able to take a surface and know what processes went into the forming of it . . . it is this very quality that provides freedom in the creative process and has the ability to open wide doors.”
Sharon grew up in Kfar Saba, a small city in Israel, and at Shenkar majored in knitting (including manual knitting, domestic knitting machines, flatbed and circular industrial knitting). After college, she moved to Tel Aviv and started working as a production manager at Zvoov, a fashion jeans company. She is now 26. Two of Sharon’s favorite projects have been “IKEA IDEA” and her final project for Shenkar.
For “IDEA IKEA,” last-year students at Shenkar were asked to create items to match the language of the corporate brand. Representatives of Ikea selected a limited number of works for exhibition at the Ikea flagship store for three months; Sharon’s work was among them. Her “Knitted Light” project is a collection of knitted sleeves for the classic IKEA lampshade (sample ALANG). “The sleeves are easily interchangeable,” Sharon tells us, “and give the product a classic and luxurious look in seconds.” Indeed, the effect is stunning: a regular IKEA lamp turns to woven crystal. “Knitted Light” is made from nylon threads, knitted on an industrial machine and requiring little finishing.
For her senior project at Shenkar, Sharon produced a collection of experimental knitwear inspired by the transformational pupal stage of the nymphalidae butterfly family. The knitwear focused on transformation of caterpillar-chrysalis-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Moriel Dezaldety- Shenkar Graduate
Today Moriel is a partner at Studio 410, a textile design studio for which she creates unique knitted wraps. Two new works of Moriel's will be debut in Israel in February: "Israeli Art" 2014, for the Israel AIDS Task Force, and "Woven Consciousness" to be displayed at the Contemporary Textile Exhibition in the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel-Aviv.
We are beyond proud to be collaborating with this school, the oldest and most prestigious institution to teach textile design in Israel!