Hangzhou Triennial Of Fiber Art

Janis Jefferies 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 has also set up and now convenes the Thursday Club was set through Goldsmiths Digital Studios ( GDS) as an informal setting for research discussions and presentations of cross-disciplinary work-in-progress. It has by now grown to include 150 members: artists, technologists, scientists, researchers, students –in fact, a growing diversity of people from different communities in London and worldwide, that are now connected via an online forum and discussion group.Janis Jefferies sits on Academic Board, the Graduate School Board, OBD (Business Unit), Widening Participation and Chairs the MAKE advisory board.

Curatorial projects:
1990 Curator 'Textile Art: Textiles from the Pierre Pauli Association and the Lausanne Biennial', Switzerland, Salts Mill, Bradford, April-June 1990
1992 Curator (sole) Invited UK selector of 7th International Tapestry Triennial, Lodz, Poland, June 1992
1995 Advisor to Lausanne Biennial, Switzerland
1995 Curator (sole) Invited UK selector of 8th International Tapestry Triennial, Lodz Poland, June 1995
2006 “Process Revealed: An exhibition of generative and digital works”, Artpool artspace and research centre, Budapest, Hungary. Co-curated with Tim Blackwell.
2004-2006 Crafts Council of England: Curatorial project, “Boys that Sew”.
National touring exhibition, February 2004 –February 2005.
2008-2009 “Crafting Geometry”, Spark Plug curatorial award, Crafts Council working with alumnus May Cornet on the relationship between math, textiles and geometry.
2007 Curator and Chair of “Textile 07”, Art Biennial, Lithuania

Key publications 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
“Touch Technologies and Museum Access”, Touch in Museum: Policy and Practice in Object Handling edited by Helen Chatterjee, Berg Publishers, 2008,
“Contemporary Textiles: The Art Fabric”, in Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2008
Interfaces of Performance edited by Janis Jefferies, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Rachel Zerihan, Ashgate Publishing, 2009
“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, with Dr. Graeme Were (UCL, London). Vol. 8, Number 1, 2010
“The Artist as Researcher in a Computer Mediated Culture”, in Art Practices in a Digital Culture, eds Gardiner and Gere, Ashgate Publishing, 2010
“Loving Attention: An outburst of craft in contemporary art” in Extra/ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art, Duke University Press, USA, (editor, Maria Buszek, Kansas City Art Institute, USA). 2010
“… and some trace of he”: Katie Mitchell's Waves in Multi Media Performance, Women: A Cultural Review, Taylor and Francis, Volume 22, Issue 4, 2011

Curatorial Grants
Janis Jefferies 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.