Hundreds of Used Tea Luggage Assemble in Ruby Silvious’s Delicate Full-Measurement Clothes — Colossal



Artwork
Design

#cyanotypes
#style
#clothes
#printmaking
#Ruby Silvious
#tea
#textiles

All photographs © Ruby Silvious, shared with permission

Once we steep a cup of tea, we usually toss out the bag as soon as it has served up its brew, however for Ruby Silvious, this humble sachet gives the premise for a particular creative apply. Recognized for her miniature paintings that use tea baggage as canvases, she has expanded her use of the fabric by using it as a cloth for larger-scale works which might be impressed by her household historical past and an curiosity in style. “It offers me an opportunity to do giant scale work, the antithesis to my miniature work,” she tells Colossal. “It’s solely pure that my artwork has all the time been impressed by style. My maternal grandmother was an excellent seamstress. I used to be solely 20 years previous after I migrated to the U.S. from the Philippines, and my very first job was at Bergdorff Goodman in New York Metropolis.”

Silvious started making clothes in 2015, spurred by an ongoing fascination with the varied strategies of printing, staining, and assembling the deconstructed segments collectively. “I’ve accrued bins of used tea baggage,” she says, “not simply from my very own consumption but in addition from family and friends who’ve generously contributed to my rising assortment.” She has made greater than ten full-size kimonos, every requiring as much as 800 used baggage to finish. Items in her most up-to-date collection, Dressed to a Tea, common roughly 75 to 125 sachets, each emptied out, flattened, and ironed earlier than being glued collectively into shirts, slips, or child-size clothes. “Some tea bag items have monoprints on them, and the easier designs are assembled with plain or barely stained, used tea baggage, giving them a extra delicate and fragile look,” she explains.

Various items from Dressed to a Tea might be on view in a weeklong exhibition at Ceres Gallery in New York from December 5 to 10. Her work will even be featured in a solo exhibit on the Ostfriedsisches Teemuseum in Norden, Germany, from March 4 to April 29, 2023. You could find extra of Silvious’s work on her website and Instagram.

#cyanotypes
#style
#clothes
#printmaking
#Ruby Silvious
#tea
#textiles

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