Ruth Farris - BA (Hons) Textiles In Practice
As a designer and maker, specialising in woven textiles, I aim to explore sustainable approaches to weaving with a focus on art-based and interior outcomes. My practice centralises on process-led experimentation and multidisciplinary methods which explore scale, colour, composition, and contrast. Often, this comes from collage, print and thorough sketchbook work, amongst other processes, which allow me to push the mediums and contexts I work within. The focus of my work often turns to my surroundings and
the connections and interactions we might have with certain artefacts or spaces.
This final body of work was developed over months of documenting and drawing the elements of my surroundings which were handcrafted, but often overlooked as mundane, such as surface design and structures in architecture and interiors, lettering, fonts and symbols. With these ideas, I aimed to give an overall sense of the more traditional and historic setting which is often undervalued and forgotten amongst more modern infrastructure, and to remind us of the importance of handmade and considered craft, in a society which pushes for mass production.
A further element of my practice is my appreciation of weave as a heritage craft, and my desire to continue the craft so it doesn't get lost to the modernisation of technology today. The importance of maintaining our connection with designing and making in a physical sense is something I feel very strongly, and something I try to evidence in every stage of my own process of making.
