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Overview
Vita Cochran is a New Zealand born, Sydney based textile practitioner who specialises in hand crafted handbags and accessories.
This trapezium-shaped bag is from a series of bags, clutches and purses entitled Her Abstracts. Vita Cochran explains:
'I was thinking of women modernists of the early twentieth century - Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp - and how their decorations were also great abstraction. And how some great painted abstractions borrowed from the decorative realm. The ‘her’ in ‘Her Abstracts’ could be several people. She could be the person I imagine wearing these works. She could be the person I imagine making them – an early twentieth century woman in love with geometry.'
Vita has fabricated the bag from painter's linen, and densely hand-embroidered it with a wool and mohair mix made by Strand Natural Fibres, a New Zealand company. The materials are integral to the look and feel of the bag. When embroidering the bags, Vita found that the plump lines of stitches sometimes followed the shapes of the bags, and at other times ignored them, and 'though the lines do seem to carry all the energy, they also frame and draw out the virtues of the linen that supports them'.