Ira Bekker

About the practice

I am a fabric artist who enjoy experimenting with different ways of bringing marks to fabric directly from my environment. Sometimes the source material is botanical, sometimes earth based. For the past 13 years I have been working mostly with botanical prints and dyes onto raw silk bought from surplus stock as well as cotton and linen bought from thrift stores. These were made into scarves and small pouches supplied to galleries. More recently I started collaborating with fashion designers, creating unique fabrics for their collections. Found is a side project that was born in a moment of very limited resources (this is a theme in my work) when I urgently needed to create a relatable product that could be sold on a maket. Rummaging through my fabric off-cuts I found beautiful pieces of cotton and linen too small for garments but begging to become something else. Just before this moment I had been experimenting painting with raw soya milk and earth pigments onto fabric. The look and feel of this technique is neither suitable for galleries nor to fashion but turned out to be perfect for a collection of beautiful soft shoulder bags and pouches. My own fabric did not last long and so I now source off-cuts from a local cotton manufacturer and thrift shops in my area. This project, although quite different in look and feel from my previous work, still draws on my primary philosophy of working with what is available locally, working soil safe and making something out of 'nothing' - creaty beauty from the things most people do not even notice.