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



Artwork
Style and design

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

All illustrations or photos © Ruby Silvious, shared with permission

When we steep a cup of tea, we typically toss out the bag after it has served up its brew, but for Ruby Silvious, this humble sachet delivers the basis for a distinct creative observe. Identified for her miniature paintings that use tea baggage as canvases, she has expanded her use of the substance by employing it as a cloth for greater-scale operates that are motivated by her family members record and an interest in manner. “It offers me a chance to do huge scale do the job, the antithesis to my miniature paintings,” she tells Colossal. “It’s only natural that my art has often been encouraged by fashion. My maternal grandmother was a excellent seamstress. I was only 20 several years outdated when I migrated to the U.S. from the Philippines, and my extremely initial position was at Bergdorff Goodman in New York City.”

Silvious commenced making garments in 2015, spurred by an ongoing fascination with the different methods of printing, staining, and assembling the deconstructed segments alongside one another. “I have accrued bins of used tea luggage,” she states, “not just from my have consumption but also from close friends and family who have generously contributed to my rising assortment.” She has built more than ten entire-dimensions kimonos, each requiring up to 800 made use of luggage to finish. Items in her most latest collection, Dressed to a Tea, regular approximately 75 to 125 sachets, each and every a single emptied out, flattened, and ironed in advance of remaining glued together into shirts, slips, or little one-measurement attire. “Some tea bag items have monoprints on them, and the easier styles are assembled with plain or slightly stained, applied tea luggage, providing them a more sensitive and fragile appear,” she clarifies.

A selection of parts from Dressed to a Tea will be on check out in a weeklong exhibition at Ceres Gallery in New York from December 5 to 10. Her do the job will also be featured in a solo show at the Ostfriedsisches Teemuseum in Norden, Germany, from March 4 to April 29, 2023. You can locate a lot more of Silvious’s perform on her website and Instagram.

#cyanotypes
#vogue
#clothes
#printmaking
#Ruby Silvious
#tea
#textiles

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