Interview with Paty Vilo for Fiber Art Fever!
Paty Vilo, president of the Fiber Art Fever! association, talks about the platform and the possibilities it offers to textile artists as a tool to promote their work, to support their professional growth by expanding the possibilities to enjoy the works of art by the general public and therefore by the contemporary art market.
New tools are being studied to broaden the range of subjects involved in this network
Instagram: Fiberartfever
Facebook: Fiberartfever Art Textile
Gruppo Facebook: Groupe de Fiberartfever Art Textile
“Exilio”, 2019, embroidery, 99×20 cm, copyright Zina Katz (Argentina)
When was the Fiber Art Fever! project born and what is its mission?
Fiber Art Fever! was born 10 years ago! We will celebrate it during all the year 2021.
Fiber Art Fever! promotes contemporary textile art through the diffusion of the creations of its artists and the artists we love. We diffuse information that can help or inspire artists: such as calls for applications, information about events and exhibitions or reports about contemporary artists and traditional textile practices around the world or interviews with artists.
With our group of artists we organise exhibitions and gather national and international contemporary textile art events (except in 2020 cause Covid).
Which professional figures/profiles is your platform aimed at?
Our platform would like to gather every kind of actors in the field of contemporary textile art.
In the first place we care for the gathering and promotion of the artists.
Then will come:
– Exhibition spaces: museum, galleries, but also biennials or recurrent events organization.
– We welcome also other actors such as curators, specialised art critics, online and printed magazines etc…
We are currently thinking about the best way to include and promote these different members.
“It´s not enough to be beautiful”, sculpture, 50x15x8cm, 2020, copyright Arna Gna (Iceland)
What are the admission criteria for textile artists to your network?
Membership is open to artists who work with yarn or its techniques in a privileged and not occasional way. Artists who join the collective may work with other materials but the use of the fiber materials or techniques related to them, must be predominant in their artistic research.
We are looking for original proposals in the trend of contemporary art.
They must have developed a very personal style even if they are beginners. We attach more importance to originality and quality of artwork, than to a large CV.
Coherence in the artist’s work as a whole is very important to us. For our exhibitions the curating is done by mutual agreement between those who invite us, myself and the artists. We need complete confidence in the quality of the artist’s work.
In addition, Artists’ works must interact with others, when we gather them for events, and also virtually.
Finally, eligibility criteria are, of course, subjective.
We don’t integrate arts and crafts: jewellery, decorative objects, accessories and clothing, etc. We also avoid having proposals that are too similar.
“A blue portrait”, 10×13 cm, 2020, embroidery, copyright Lia de Jonghe (The Netherlands)
What do you consider as “textile art”?
By textile art we mean the use of flexible materials in order to produce a piece of art, such as : thread, textile fibre, flexible plastics, human hair, horse hair, rubber, flexible metal thread, vegetable fiber and so on. It may include some harder components if they are associated with a textile technique.
We do not include crafts, design and decorative arts.
By craft and decorative arts, we mean all creations with an utilitarian or decorative purpose, for the body or the home: jewellery, lamps, clothing, etc…
We consider:
Thread drawing and needle painting, either hand or machine embroidery or assisted by computer
Tapestry
Soft sculpture or any type of volume
Photography when the photographed object is « textile » manufactured
Installations with textile material or thread
Videos and performances when thread or similar is an important part of it
Needle work (hand or machine) or with textile techniques such as knitting, crochet, lace, interlacing, knotting.…
We stay attentive to other art forms as long as the thread or the textile techniques are very present in the final work.
“Semeur 001”, 2019, 15 x 9 cm, crochet, copyright Marc Janaszek (France)
“Bidule argenté”, 2018, Crochet, 20x28x15cm, 2018, copyright Hélène Angeletti (France)
What does Fiber Art Fever! offer to artists who join it? What are the advantages for those who participate?
First, we offer a constant diffusion of their artwork and events. This is the most important part of Fiber Art Fever! Artists don’t always have the time or don’t necessarily like to do the diffusion of their artwork and events, so we relay them.
Our website is visited internationally, helped by our own social networks accounts (Facebook and Instagram). For example we have almost 20,000 followers on Facebook. Each member of the platform includes a link from their own site to ours (when they have one) and communicates on their membership of our group. In this way, the connections between our networks goes both ways.
Before the end of the year we will open our own You Tube channel to broadcast videos of our artists and soon our own reports and interviews about them, events we participate, and so on.
Since its creation, our site is used as a platform for curators and event organisers, as well as for art book authors, who come here to do their selections.
The future web site aim to ease and enhance this part of gathering selections for curators.
We do also direct connections when an event organiser makes a specific request to us.
Finally, we normally organise 2 to 3 exhibitions per year with a few artists, chosen according to the selected theme, and consistency of the exhibition. Factors like transportation, logistics and financial terms also impact.
The next group exhibition will be our participation in the Art Up Salon in Lille (https://lille.art-up.com/ ), which was at first taking place in March 2020 (postposed because of Covid) and which should take place in June 2021. This contemporary art fair will show a special edition of contemporary textile art.
“Inner script 1”, embroidery, copyright Karola Pezarro (The Netherlands)
“Sylvia hair”, embroidery, 70x50cm, 2019, copyright Elyse Galiano (Belgium)
Very often linguistic differences are a problem that makes it difficult for artists to make their work known. How do you propose to solve this criticality?
Our future platform will be trilingual: French, English, Spanish. Each artist fills out his page in one of these three languages. For the general topics of the site, we already provide an english version.
The future platform will also include the possibility to use google translate.
Social networks such as Facebook, Instagram systematically offer a translation in the reader’s own language. Which is very convenient to us!
It seems to me that language is no longer a difficulty on the Internet. It is easy to find translation sites that allow you to understand, or to offer a good translation by copying and pasting if necessary.
What are the future developments for your network?
- We’d like to include more international artists
- Welcome exhibition spaces, contributor and other actors of contemporary art with textile fibre.
- Create our platform as we want it to be, so that each member can create his own site independently
- Include an internal forum and an integrated newsletter on our platform
- Create an online sales gallery
