Family Interests

Depictions of family life are as varied as families themselves. Paula Rego's painting 'The Family' (above) has a distinctly threatening atmosphere! Stanley Spencer's memories of domestic bliss are also less than rosy, but the image of the whole family helping to bath the baby has a certain charm.
Helen Oxenbury's illustrations for 'We're going on a Bear Hunt' (below) are perhaps nearer to the image of the ideal childhood.
Joan Eardley painted the same family of children that lived next door to her in a Glasgow tenement. She showed them playing out in the street everyday, having been sent out from under their mother's feet. The older children looking out for the younger ones.
Natasha Kerr's textile pieces often feature old family photos and scraps of fabric that have significant memories for her.

Bags of Interest

Film maker Peter Greenaway created a fictional character called Tulse Luper. He made an installation of 93 suitcases that contained clues to Luper's identity.
Tracy Emin used her signature autobiographical style to create this bag for the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Peter Clark is an artist who uses his vast collection of collage material to create illustrations of garments and more, such as the bag pictured below.

Colourful Wrappings

When Sonia Delaunay made a quilt for her new baby using scraps of fabric (shown above), she started on a path that would lead her to becoming one of the most famous textile designers of the 20th century. She continued to create her geometric pattern fabrics well into her old age.

Surrealist Eileen Agar's sculpture (above) is probably her best known piece. It is a life size head wrapped in colourful silk scarfs, jewellery and feathers. Judith Scott was a textile artist who had Down's Syndrome. She would produce large scale sculptures from found objects that she wrapped in layer upon layer of wool, fabric and thread (below).
Suzanne Tidwell is one of a group of yarn bombers from Seattle. These artists started by creating a form of knitted graffiti, but they are now being commissioned to produce installations for the city.
Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss film maker and artist. As part of an installation at the Hayward Gallery she created a chandelier from underwear.
Pop Artists James Rosenquist started his painting in the tradition of Andy Warhol and others by looking at billboard adverts and supermarket packaging, however he has taken his work further by distorting the colourful images as though viewed through a fairground mirror.

Layers

'Layers' could be interpreted through the subject matter and/or the artist's method of working. Kurt Schwitters (above) created collages with found objects and then worked into them. Jacques Villegle was inspired by torn billboards (below) and particularly focused on the typographic elements.
Valerie Roybal is a contemporary artists working in collage, she takes books and journals and creates more orderly compositions, often incorporating embroidery (below). Just as Schwitters and Villegle, she juxtaposes images and text to allow the viewer to decide on their own interpretations.
Barbara Lee Smith is a textile artist who works in mixed media. Her landscape pieces are painted, printed and stitched. The work below is entitled 'Estuary' and you can see a detail below that.

Swedish illustrator Camilla Engman collects simple objects like these envelopes and then lets them inspire her narrative drawings.
Norma Starszakowna is a textile artist who uses mixed media techniques to create pieces that evoke the memories left within the walls of buildings.
Anthony Brown created a series of paintings for an exhibition in Liverpool about 100 famous creative people from the city. Each portrait is worked over the top of newspaper headlines, photographs and images of events from the subjects life, such as this portrayal of John Lennon.
Nick Gentry paints portraits on old floppy discs (see below), carefully aligning the pupils of the eyes with the centre of the discs.