Based in Wellington, New Zealand, Barbara Wheeler is an Australian artist working with natural fibres and fabrics, botanic prints and dyes in a practice that spans clothing design, stitching, basketry and fabric piecing.
Barbara founded her clothing label ‘every thread counts’ in 2016 to raise awareness of the environmental and social impacts of global fast fashion and to promote the wearability of natural fibres.
Barbara engages the viewer through the mediums of textiles and fibres to explore the challenges the world faces, employing craftswomanship as a quiet disruption to catalyse change. Her artworks prompt us to examine materiality, our over consumption of ‘stuff’ and waste of precious, finite resources, and to rethink our connection to planet earth.
Wrapped is a coiled basket gown that utilises a recycled, sustainable paper product. Barbara has made a wearable paper basket.
Constructed from the bottom up, Barbara applied a simple basketry technique of coiling a 14 ply weaver (14 strands) of paper twine, secured by knotted paper twine stakes that travel up the garment. The rigid basketry technique was abandoned at the neckline in an eruption of chaos that almost secures the materials.
‘It commenced as a quirky exercise investigating the properties of baskets to create an integrated fabric for a garment. During the making, and whilst working with her model, Wrapped grew into a work that encourages a playful masculinity’. (Edited from Artist’s Statement).
Materials: 2350m of paper twine, produced in Japan from recycled milk cartons.
The Making of Wrapped - combined edit
Making of Video #5 - Meet Barbara’s model and learn of his connection to lutruwita Tasmania
every thread counts WEBSITE