featured artist
Randall Darwall
Randall Darwall is a hand weaver and designer who for 30 years has been working in New England, steadily gaining international recognition as a producer of dye-patterned silks.
The artist’s signature fabrics are the result of a constant search for unusual yarn combinations and complex color relationships working through a diverse collection of weave structures. The aim always is to create a different kind of textile cloth that is both fully functional and artistically evocative-filled with both intent and content.
As a hand weaver working in the context of a small cottage industry, he is able to achieve fabrics not possible by industrial production. Darwall draws upon many traditions, particularly nonwestern sericultures. He works with many different kinds of silk yarns, from reeled flosses to spun noils, combining them with other natural fibers in order to improve the hand and drape of the cloth. Wool, for example, is used in small amounts to add wrinkle recovery. When interlaced, silk slips dramatically on itself in use. His textiles sold here at Freehand Gallery are therefore consciously more tightly constructed in order to naturally soften as they age.
His work was the only apparel cloth chosen for the American Craft Museum’s ‘Art to Wear’ and ‘Craft Today’, not to mention several national touring exhibitions.
Darwall's beautiful work is now available for purchase in our Los Angeles Freehand Gallery, and here online as well.
Randall Darwall is a hand weaver and designer who for 30 years has been working in New England, steadily gaining international recognition as a producer of dye-patterned silks.
The artist’s signature fabrics are the result of a constant search for unusual yarn combinations and complex color relationships working through a diverse collection of weave structures. The aim always is to create a different kind of textile cloth that is both fully functional and artistically evocative-filled with both intent and content.
As a hand weaver working in the context of a small cottage industry, he is able to achieve fabrics not possible by industrial production. Darwall draws upon many traditions, particularly nonwestern sericultures. He works with many different kinds of silk yarns, from reeled flosses to spun noils, combining them with other natural fibers in order to improve the hand and drape of the cloth. Wool, for example, is used in small amounts to add wrinkle recovery. When interlaced, silk slips dramatically on itself in use. His textiles sold here at Freehand Gallery are therefore consciously more tightly constructed in order to naturally soften as they age.
His work was the only apparel cloth chosen for the American Craft Museum’s ‘Art to Wear’ and ‘Craft Today’, not to mention several national touring exhibitions.
Darwall's beautiful work is now available for purchase in our Los Angeles Freehand Gallery, and here online as well.