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Bio
Celeste Malvar-Stewart is a Filipina-American fashion and fibre artist who focuses on sustainable design and its role in contemporary art. Her work emphasizes the importance of how slow and artisanal fashion offers a more meaningful alternative within one of the most harmful industries, and how "connection" can be encouraged by incorporating organic local materials.
Statement
Celeste Malvar-Stewart is a fashion designer and textile artist who felts, weaves, and spins natural fibers. She grew up in the California Bay Area in the 1970s after immigrating from the Philippines with her family. As a child, she watched her relatives pick vegetables in the fields while she played nearby. “I always perceived immigrants with agriculture. My child mind would ask, 'Without their labor, how would we all eat?’” Amalgamation merges the memories of those early experiences with her current passion for natural materials. The work features 88 felted panels—one for each county in Ohio—made of alpaca fibre from Ohio family farms. Hand-woven abaca fibres from a family farm in the Philippines and dyed with organic indigo represent the percentage of immigrant or foreign-born residents in each county.
Bio
Celeste Malvar-Stewart is a Filipina-American fashion and fibre artist who focuses on sustainable design and its role in contemporary art. Her work emphasizes the importance of how slow and artisanal fashion offers a more meaningful alternative within one of the most harmful industries, and how "connection" can be encouraged by incorporating organic local materials.
Statement
Celeste Malvar-Stewart is a fashion designer and textile artist who felts, weaves, and spins natural fibers. She grew up in the California Bay Area in the 1970s after immigrating from the Philippines with her family. As a child, she watched her relatives pick vegetables in the fields while she played nearby. “I always perceived immigrants with agriculture. My child mind would ask, 'Without their labor, how would we all eat?’” Amalgamation merges the memories of those early experiences with her current passion for natural materials. The work features 88 felted panels—one for each county in Ohio—made of alpaca fibre from Ohio family farms. Hand-woven abaca fibres from a family farm in the Philippines and dyed with organic indigo represent the percentage of immigrant or foreign-born residents in each county.
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