About the Curator

Professor Janis Jefferies

Janis Jefferies is is an artist, writer and curator, Professor of Visual Arts at the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths University of London, Director of the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles and Artistic Director of Goldsmiths Digital Studios. Jefferies was trained as a painter and later pioneered the field of contemporary textiles within visual and material culture, internationally through exhibitions and texts. In the last five years she has been working on technological based arts, including Woven Sound (with Dr. Tim Blackwell) and has been a principal investigator on projects involving new haptics technologies by bringing the sense of touch to the interface between people and machines and generative software systems for creating and interpreting cultural artefacts, museums and the external environment. She is an associate researcher with Hexagram (Institute of Media, Arts and Technologies, Montreal, Canada) on two projects, electronic textiles and new forms of media communication in cloth. She currently holds a Crafts Council Spark Plug curating award that seeks to examine the creative and dynamic relationship between mathematics, mathematical forms and craft through an exploration of a particular maths and textile archive, called Common Threads, that is held in the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Key publication include:

• ‘Laboured Cloth: Translations of Hybridity in Contemporary Art’, in The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production,The Art School of the Art Institute of Chicago/MIT Press, USA, (eds. Joan Livingston and John Ploof), 2007
• ‘Contemporary textiles: the Art Fabric’ in Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art, Black Dog publishing, 2008.
• Essay, ‘Loving Attention: An outburst of craft in contemporary art’ will be part of the forthcoming anthology, Extra/ordinary: Craft culture and contemporary art (forthcoming, Duke University Press and edited by dr. maria elena buszek).
• ‘One and another: a handshake with the ancestors’ in The Shape of Things, Alinah Azadeh, The Gifts, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Guest Editor for ‘Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture’, Tensions: Transformations and Social practices, Vol. 8, Number 1, with Dr. Graeme Were (UCL, London), 2010
• ‘The Artist as Researcher in a Computer Mediated Culture’, in Art Practices in a Digital Culture, eds Gardiner and Gere, Ashsgate Publishing, 2010