Rachel Long - A Night Walk

A Night Walk In 2024, as part of an Asia New Zealand foundation Art Practitioners funded-project, Rachel Long undertook a residency at the prestigious Kawashima Textile School in Kyoto Japan. 

There, her study took a full immersion approach, focusing on learning the traditional textile process Kasuri, a weaving technique where threads are partially dyed prior to weaving, resulting in blurred or fragmented patterns. Through her exhibit, A Night Walk, Long showcases her works using the Kasuri practices, drawing on her personal experiences walking the streets in and around Ichihara, Kyoto.

Rachel Long

Rachel Long experiments with the future potentials of a contemporary weaver to explore the elements of form, rhythm, time, space, and materiality. Since completion of a Bachelor of Design with first class Honours majoring in textile design at Massey University in 2015, Long has been developing her textile practice in her studio in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Engaging in a studio led practice in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington has allowed many and varied opportunities to engage with esteemed local and international designers, artists and curators on an expansive and diverse scope of projects.

Since 2015 Long has developed a body of work and a distinctive approach to her textile practice.

Working on small table looms then advancing to larger floor looms, Long became focused on making textile artefacts that employ the textile design processes weave and natural dye creating textile objects to be experienced in interior spaces and also worn on the body.

The yarn from her assemblage is carefully selected then natural dyed to bring new life and colour to the material then intentionally arranged on the loom to create warp and weft for the woven textile structures.

For Long the weaving process is an abstract state where intuition and body come together to construct textile objects that aspire to bring an engaging consensus of form, rhythm and materiality to then be experienced in a time and space that can then deliver an awareness to the particular merging, conversation of the said elements in a textile dimension.