Off the Wall
Helen Banzhaf’s course of study and her professional life have been dedicated to fashion, the art of design, pattern cutting, the construction/tailoring of garments, and working with cloth and its many potentials.
She sees fashion as an art form – sculpture for the body – and she still designs and makes original one-off pieces of clothing with a hint of asymmetry, some raw edges here and there with stitches exposed and threads dripping.
The brief of Tailored, should have been ideal for her, but she chose to work an embroidered piece of jewellery where, for once, the cloth is insignificant and it’s the landscape and the density of the stitches that smother the surface.
Helen’s embroidered textiles are generally exhibited on the gallery wall. Here she has evolved the stitched technique into a piece of wearable art. Something to complement a fine piece of understated tailoring maybe. She has stolen the decorative design from one of her most recent triptychs and tailored the abstract pattern to create this embroidered neckpiece.
