What do these seemingly incongruous things all have in common? They all describe the magic and wonder of artist Eric Rieger, aka HOTTEA, and his use of a nearly endless gathering of strings to create epic art installations that appear to “have a mind of their own,” according to My Modern Met.

A location-specific endeavor usually influenced by HOTTEA’s own personal experiences and connections with places, people, and time, the individual strands become larger than the sum of their parts when deliberately placed for maximum impact — a sensory overload that’s both visual and tactile, and a living embodiment of gloriously rainbow-hued complexities come to life.

Rieger is certainly no stranger to colorful yarn installations that mesmerize viewers with their vastness and statement-making colors. One only needs to check out his “Letting Go” or “Hot Lunch” installations, both prime examples of his willingness to expand perceptions using only yarn. Best known for both outdoor and indoor yarn pieces that are as grandiose as they are impactful, the Minneapolis-based artist has branched out from his Minnesota roots with his latest project entitled Strangers, located in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

A reflection of the people he met while creating the installation and his experiences in Brazil, the vast 100-foot-long, 30-foot wide piece is meant to incorporate both memory and a sense of belonging. As the artist himself has said, “The word ‘Stranger’ often times has a negative connotation, [and so] I titled this installation Strangers because I liked the idea of referring to a stranger as a positive thing.”

It seems the artist’s kaleidoscopic Brazilian installation is just the beginning for additional projects that see him creating further cascades of colors across the U.S., with locations including Los Angeles, New York City, and Far Rockaway, New York, in addition to a collaboration for a fashion show and new project in his Twin City home base.

Exploring human relationships, memory, and life experiences, the saturated hues and the ethereal beauty of HOTTEA’s yarn installations are not only visual cornucopias of color, but also tactile treats that seem to breathe with a life of their own. Often consisting of (literal) miles of brightly-hued yarn strands that are delightfully cartoonish in scope, the artist’s latest installation, entitled “Stranger,” further exemplifies his talent for manipulating textiles into full-blown multisensory experiences.

To see more, check out HOTTEA’s Instagram @hotxtea

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A thin, double-curved concrete pavilion by Zaha Hadid Architects and ETH Zurich allows us to look at concrete in a whole new way. “KnitCandela” pays homage to the concrete shell structures of Spanish-Mexican architect and engineer Félix Candela, revolutionizing them for a new age using computational design methods and innovative cable-net and textile structural components known as KnitCrete “formworks.” Traditionally, formworks for curved concrete structures are made of wood. Unfortunately, those formworks are expensive to produce and transport, and they nearly always end up in the trash when the project is complete.

“While Candela relied on combining hyperbolic paraboloid surfaces (“hypes”) to produce reusable formworks leading to a reduction of construction waste, KnitCrete allows for the realization of a much wider range of anticlastic geometries,” explains the team over at Zaha Hadid. “With this cable-net and fabric formwork system, expressive, freeform concrete surfaces can now be constructed efficiently, without the need for complex molds. KnitCandela’s thin, double-curved concrete shell, with a surface area of almost 50 square meters and weighing more than five tonnes, was applied on a KnitCrete formwork of 55 kilograms. The knitted fabric of the formwork system was carried to Mexico from Switzerland in a suitcase.”

The geometry of the shell takes inspiration from the colorful traditional dresses of Jalisco, Mexico, as well as Candela’s own acclaimed restaurant at Xochimilco. The design is the result of a collaborative effort between teams in Europe and Mexico, and it was designed to be built on a tight schedule in a small space with a low budget. The experimental structure marries old and new, making sure not to discount the value of skilled human labor by “integrating digital fabrication with the skills of traditional craftsmanship and construction methods.”

The process of building the KnitCandela pavilion was actually pretty cool. It began with a support system of wood and tensioned cable-net that remained inside the finished structure instead of being thrown away afterward. Four long strips of knitted textiles ranging from 15 meters to 26 meters in length were then woven around this base in two distinct layers: an interior aesthetic surface that displays a colorful pattern, and an exterior surface that creates the structure’s overall shape. Before it was covered in cement paste, special modeling balloons were inserted into the empty spaces, producing a “structurally efficient waffle shell” of cavities inside.

The architects add: “The soft, colorful textile interior of KnitCandela’s shell and its hard, concrete exterior are visible from all viewing angles. The textile’s striped pattern expresses the knitting fabrication process and the radial symmetry of the shape. This patterning, along with the simultaneous visibility of the soft interior and the hard exterior of the shell, enhances the visitor’s spatial experience and the curvatures of the KnitCandela’s form.”

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Strands of discarded yarn from a textile manufacturer become the sky, water, sand, bark and moss in realistic large-scale landscapes by Alexandra Kehayoglou in project intersecting fine art and carpet making. The artist retrieves scraps and unwanted materials from her family’s Buenos Aires factory, El Espartano, and painstakingly manipulates the threads into a point-by-point weft to create layer after layer of each composition.

The results are textural tapestries worthy of any gallery wall, yet still practical for functional usage. Some larger pieces stretch from the wall onto the floor, effectively immersing the viewer in the natural location of the artist’s choosing, whether that’s a dark, lush forest or a palm tree-lined beach.

Some pieces are designed to lay on the floor like conventional carpets, but their irregular shape makes them look like islands and archipelagos of greenery set against hard, impersonal surfaces like tile or even the asphalt of streets when they’re on display outdoors.

El Espartano is known for using highly distinctive yarn and thread to produce heirloom-quality textiles, and through her art, Kehayaglou expands her family’s legacy in a new direction.

The post Art Carpets: Pastoral Scenes Rendered in Sculptural Textiles first appeared on Dornob.

Andrea Brena took some time off from school to get his hands dirty (or at least brightly-colored), dabbling in the old art of arm knitting using trashed textile scraps from chairs, couches, carpets and pillows.

The result are a neat series of rugs, seats and more, all created with a physical process in which the body is involved on a high level, almost like a dance or hand-carved sculpture.

The post Arm Knitting Revisited via Giant Hand-Knit Furnishing Series first appeared on Dornob.

Yarn tells two kinds of tales: narratives are said to be weaved or spun as yarns, but there is a more literal meaning we also know. This curious street art project spans both definitions, creating small stories while infilling physical gaps in urban fabric.

Juliana Santacruz Herrera began this beautification project in Paris, selectively decorating cracked and broken parts of the pavement with stretched yarn in a rainbow of colors. There is an almost-organic nature to the strange formations of string that result, as if they had crawled, intertwined and nested of their own will in a mysteriously self-selecting manner.

Whether it is pure fun or functional is up for debate, though, arguably, Parisian drives could find these voids less destructive with a little padding, or perhaps simply avoid them now that they are so much easier to see. It is a little like this ongoing LEGO building infill project, and could maybe also be applied in the same way to vertical surfaces rather than just horizontal ones.

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