Cristina Busnelli

Weaver | Bassano del Grappa, Italy

Weaving colours on the loom

Cristina is a textile designer with a passion for weaving
She makes secular and sacral textile objects
Through workshops, she shares her craft with adults and children

Out of her atelier in the picturesque town of Bassano del Grappa, Cristina Busnelli has been making textile wonders on her loom since 1982. A graduate in industrial design from the Polytechnic School of Design in Milan, Cristina handcrafts everything from wall tapestries and carpets to fashion garments. "I combine tradition and experimentation. I work with diverse fibres, curved wefts and layered textures that give 3D forms to my pieces, liturgical clothes, jewellery and home furnishing," she explains. Cristina also teaches textile workshops in schools and cultural institutions across Italy. She has exhibited her works at various craft and design events in Italy and abroad, and has received numerous awards for her contributions to contemporary textile art.

Interview

©Peter Elovich

What does your creative process look like?: My process looks different depending on what type of piece I am making. I create commissioned works, exhibition pieces, and textiles simply from the desire to narrate a story or evoke a landscape through threads, colour and woven texture.
How did you make your liturgical pieces?: Liturgical vestments are almost always made to measure for the specific church or sacred space where they will be placed. Colours, symbols and decorative motifs are never random. They respond to precise liturgical rules and iconographic traditions.
In what way do colour combinations guide your work?: They emerge from a constant search for harmony by layering and juxtaposing different tones. Colours interact with varied materials and surfaces, generating changing chromatic effects and subtle visual vibrations within the woven structure.
How has your work evolved over the years?: I started with strictly geometric compositions, and later expanded my work to varied surfaces, materials and weaving structures. Over time, my patterns became less linear as I started exploring voids and solids, transparency, optical depth and increasingly 3D-forms.

Cristina Busnelli is a master artisan: she began her career in 1982 and she started teaching in 1982