Thousands of Used Tea Bags Assemble in Ruby Silvious’s Delicate Full-Size Garments — Colossal



Art
Design and style

#cyanotypes
#fashion
#garments
#printmaking
#Ruby Silvious
#tea
#textiles

All pictures © Ruby Silvious, shared with authorization

When we steep a cup of tea, we commonly toss out the bag at the time it has served up its brew, but for Ruby Silvious, this humble sachet supplies the basis for a unique artistic exercise. Known for her miniature paintings that use tea luggage as canvases, she has expanded her use of the substance by using it as a cloth for larger sized-scale will work that are influenced by her spouse and children historical past and an interest in trend. “It gives me a chance to do substantial scale operate, the antithesis to my miniature paintings,” she tells Colossal. “It’s only all-natural that my artwork has generally been influenced by fashion. My maternal grandmother was a fantastic seamstress. I was only 20 years aged when I migrated to the U.S. from the Philippines, and my very 1st position was at Bergdorff Goodman in New York Town.”

Silvious commenced creating garments in 2015, spurred by an ongoing fascination with the various solutions of printing, staining, and assembling the deconstructed segments collectively. “I have gathered bins of utilized tea bags,” she suggests, “not just from my own use but also from close friends and family members who have generously contributed to my expanding selection.” She has built extra than ten entire-measurement kimonos, each and every demanding up to 800 employed baggage to finish. Pieces in her most recent collection, Dressed to a Tea, average around 75 to 125 sachets, each individual 1 emptied out, flattened, and ironed prior to currently being glued together into shirts, slips, or child-measurement dresses. “Some tea bag parts have monoprints on them, and the simpler styles are assembled with basic or slightly stained, utilised tea bags, offering them a more delicate and fragile look,” she describes.

A amount of pieces from Dressed to a Tea will be on see in a weeklong exhibition at Ceres Gallery in New York from December 5 to 10. Her do the job will also be highlighted in a solo exhibit at the Ostfriedsisches Teemuseum in Norden, Germany, from March 4 to April 29, 2023. You can come across a lot more of Silvious’s work on her site and Instagram.

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

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