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Melanie Bowles
Digital Shibori
2010
Silk organza
Bowles’ work makes parallels between traditional craft techniques and new technology, illustrating the transition between the old and new processes being adopted in design today.
Translating the traditional Shibori art of folding, knotting, stitching, pinching and dyeing, Bowles reinterprets these techniques using digital media. She manipulates complex mathematical graphic geometrics to create light effects, folds and blends that retain the original essence of Shibori. The result is digitally printed onto fabric.
Biography
Bowles is a digital textile designer, Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design and author of Digital Textile Design. She is passionate about digital textile design and its relationship to traditional textile design and digital technology.
Bowles is currently working on a new publication about digital textile design projects, and her work has recently been exhibited in the Trash Treasure exhibition at the Science Museum and Re- Think, at Audax Textile Museum, Tilberg, Netherlands. She is also collaborating with Dr Emma Neuberg on a series of Slow/Fast textile workshops at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which looks at historical reference and its translation through digital technology.