Art from the earth featured at new fibre art exhibition.

Emerging textile artist Jess Forster uses natural materials from her Riverina home’s environment to create the evocative Kindred of the Dustexhibition, opening at Newcastle’s Timeless Textiles in June.

Forster’s sculptured felt artworks feature locally collected fibres, native seeds and earth pigments. Her work is an experimental inquiry into the emotionally constructed relationship between humans and the natural environments that surround us. The Kindred of the Dustcollection questions our connections to place.

The works are embedded and dyed into powerful topographic landscapes, hollowed felt totems, and three-dimensional limbs. Some pieces have been left outside at various locations that are meaningful to Forster. This has allowed natural weathering, colouring and the germination of seeds. The forms have become a conceptual mapping-tool. They are physical representations of Forster’s land and location. They also seek to capture her emotional connection to place and ‘home’.

“I feel a deep affinity with the bush, waterways and land formations that surround where I live, and where I grew up,” Forster said. “My current work explores the contrast between our ‘nesting’ and ‘nomadic’ instincts. That is, the magnetising pull of place and home versus an overwhelming curiosity to journey.”

Forster’s works are observations of the cyclical, miniscule natural processes in our world. She observes a tiny seedling poking through the earth, ant highways, dripping sap, opening seed-pods, bark of ancient gums and the organic patterns of silt drying on the edges of billabongs.

“I like to imagine these tiny happenings out of their context, under a microscope, from the air, or as if I was nestled inside,” Forster said.

Forster graduated from a Bachelor Design/Art Education from UNSW in 2015. She worked as a Textile and Visual Arts teacher before working in the Netherlands in 2016 for textile artist Claudy Jongstra. She received a Create NSW Young Regional Artist Scholarship to help develop her practice and has been a part of numerous exhibitions. These include ‘Push the Medium’ at the Narrandera Arts Centre, and three solo exhibitions in Wagga Wagga, Tumbarumba and Orange.

The exhibition runs from 13 June to 8 July with the opening on 14 June.

Artists dig deep for Subterranean exhibition.

Nine Australian textile artists have produced remarkable works in felt to honour the work of innovative German feltmaker Charlotte Sehmisch for Subterranean, a new exhibition opening at Newcastle’s Timeless Textiles in July.

Sehmisch studied architecture in Weiner, Germany, before studying fashion in Halie. Since 1998, she has worked as a fashion and hat designer, created stage outfits, including hand-made felt hats and dresses, and taught at various European colleges. Her highly original sculptural techniques have attracted attention, with her work widely exhibited in Germany and France.

Sehmisch has worked with felt, other textiles and even building materials during her career to create her amazing work. She has used techniques such as lamellae, cracks, chambers and helixes to create architecturally based felt structures. Her approach is based in geometric designs.

“I presume my love for sculptural surfaces, three dimensional objects and geometrics has its origins in my architecture studies,” says Charlotte of her approach. “I am a huge fan of Bauhaus.”

The feltmakers invited to respond to Sehmisch’s work for the Subterranean exhibition were given the freedom to apply their own interpretation and felt-making techniques.

Timeless Textiles owner, Anne Kempton, was one of the contributing artists.

“The exhibition explores ideas of land and of layers through the medium of felt,” Kempton said. “Subterraneanhas been interpreted in many ways: geologically, socially, emotionally and structurally.”

TheSubterranean felt makers include Anne Kempton, Anita Larkin, Julie Brennan, Giselle Penn, Sachiko Kotaka, Jessica Forster, Catherine OLeary, Pam Hovel and Pam de Groot.

Subterranean runs from 11 July to 5 August, with the opening from 6 to 8pm on Thursday 12 July.