The January/February 2015 issue of Rug Hooking Magazine contains an in depth article by Sue Lange, South Australia, on Tony Bomford (1927-2003) and features eight images from his collection of 18 complex and mathematical hooked rugs.
Bomford’s rugs are latch hooked using short pieces of wool yarn, however the designs could be created using other rug hooking techniques. After his death in 2003 several of Tony’s rugs were accepted into the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. His unpublished rug book was bequeathed by Tony to the National Library of Australia, Canberra.
In her article Sue says –
” In 2004 Dr Dunham of the University of Minnesota published the first of two academic papers featuring Tony’s hyperbolic rug. If these geometric patterns fascinate you and you’d like to find out more, contact Dr. Doug Dunham at the University of Minnesota .”
Click this link to read more about the mathematical rugs of Tony Bomford, to read more about the life of the extraordinary engineer who hooked rugs, click this link:
http://www.bomford.net/IrishBomfords/Chapters/Chapter26/childpages/TonyBomfordObituary.htm
Magazine images are shown by permission of Rug Hooking Magazine
While it’s exciting to pull the magazine from your mailbox and start flipping through it deciding which articles to read first, international postage makes subscribing more expensive for those of us in Australia.
Click Digital Subscription and see how to avoid this additional expense.
It’s great to see the Australian Connection continue in this magazine which features creative, artistic and instructional articles.
This is not the first article by an Australian rug hooker or about Australian rugmakers. Sue has had other articles published in Rug Hooking Magazine and so have I (Jo Franco). Plus several articles and images were published by members of TIGHR after they visited Australia for the 2012 Triennial Conference of The Internationale Guild of Handhooking Rugmakers.
Even earlier, there was an interesting article published in Rug hooking Magazine, July/August 1990 by Lee Pattinson (dec) telling of the history of rug making in Australia and mentioning the amazing body of work by fibre artist Isobel Foster from Victoria.
Some of Isobel’s creations can be seen in the first entry of this Guild’s Facebook timeline. I took these photos (with Isobel’s permission) when I traveled from Western Australia to meet up with a group of rughookers from South Australia and Victoria to visit The Challenge of Colour Isobel Foster Retrospective Exhibition at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KnpPeXt_7Q
at the Burrinja Gallery in January 2014.
++++++++++++
