Tactile Drawing & Textiles

Come join artist Oly Bliss @olybliss for a creative workshop that fuses tactile drawing and textiles to design your own self-portrait in thread. In this session, Oly will guide you through a mindful artistic process in building up your own tactile design in an expressive and experimental way, and help you play with different materials to give you the confidence to build up your design long after the session has ended.

Please come ready with A2/A1 paper or plain fabric of a similar size (Calico is recommended). Your preferred medium.  We recommend oil pastel, maker pens (thick) Graphite sticks (pencil is not recommended) colour sticks, pastels, or charcoal.

Oly Bliss is a textile artist based in Worcester. His work explores sexuality, gender, identity, and heritage. He is interested in visual symbolism within his work. He enjoys experimenting playfully with materials to redefine their presentation and purpose. He is mindfully aware of how we adorn materials or surround ourselves with certain materials to amplify how we want others to view our sense of self. Adding a dressing to something can change how a ‘viewer’ may choose to perceive it as a subject. He is interested in how this interaction of materials provides meaning between subject and a viewer. You can view his website here: https://www.olybliss.com

He is also a member of seam Collective @seam_collective a group of contemporary textile artists. You can learn more about their approaches to textiles here: https://seamcollective.org/about/