Fibers and Colors from the Fields: Book, Paper, Fabric

Course Description

This class will allow participants the opportunity to share in my findings from years of connecting with collected natural fibers. We will create handmade and printed papers for framing, poetry, and books. Additionally, we will make small weavings with nontraditional material and explore fabric surface design through various projects. 

Heritage crop plant materials, folklore, Indigenous color references and applications, and more discoveries through tactile hands-on exploration will form the basis for our creative process throughout the week. Culling, stitching, writing, and completing works will allow participants to take away a handmade paper sampler, handmade books with botanical prints, natural dyed handmade paper, fabric for a book cover, a bag or your choice of personally designed outcome, and a small weaving. We will discuss dye recipes, dye garden plans, and ways to preserve and store raw materials for future color.

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Artist Biography

A 2016, TEDx Speaker, Catherine Cross Tsintzos has spent a lifetime in the arts both as a practicing artist and educator, an Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary artist who has a clear purpose in building and crossing bridges among the arts.  She has a deep focus and balance between artistic practice, teaching, activism, and invitation for participation.

Catherine works with nature and the environment exploring biodegradable man-made and raw materials along with wild color she creates after foraging and gathering bits and pieces from fields, farms, trees, streams, rivers, and coastal waterways as she travels throughout the Southeastern United States. 
Catherine’s Art and Agriculture Series touches on farming, historic gardening, swept yards, field to fiber materials, southern social and cultural issues, historic crops of the south, sewing circles, recorded stories and memories from those she interviews, and photographs along the journey.
 
Catherine grew up in an artist and food environment in North and South Carolina. From the farm to the grocery shelf, her grandparents were both farmers and food merchants. She has spent her entire art career incorporating her love of nature into her work. Over the years Catherine has shown and sold her work through gallery, museum and studio exhibitions.