_Janis Jefferies
Director, Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles, (CHRRCT), Goldsmiths
BIOGRAPHY:
Janis Jefferies is an artist, writer and curator, Professor of Visual Arts at the Department of
Computing, Goldsmiths University of London, Director of the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles and Artistic
Director of Goldsmiths Digital Studios. She trained as a painter and later pioneered the field of contemporary textiles within visual
and material culture, internationally through exhibitions and texts. In the last five years she has been working on technological
based arts, including Woven Sound (with Dr. Tim Blackwell) and has been a principal investigator on projects involving new haptics
technologies and generative software systems for creating and interpreting arts objects. Recent publication inlcude, ‘Laboured Cloth:
Translations of Hybridity in Contemporary Art’, in The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production,The Art School of the Art
Institute of Chicago/MIT Press, USA, (eds. Joan Livingston and John Ploof), 2007 and ‘Contemporary textiles: the Art Fabric’ in
Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art, Black Dog publishing, 2008.
She is an associate researcher with Hexagram (Institute of Media, Arts and Technologies, Montreal, Canada) on two projects, electronic
textiles and new forms of media communication in cloth. She currently holds a Crafts Council Spark Plug curating award that seeks to
examine the creative and dynamic relationship between mathematics, mathematical forms and craft through an exploration of a particular
maths and textile archive, called Common Threads, that is held in the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles,
Goldsmiths, University of London.
Contact e-mail: j.jefferies@gold.ac.uk
Janis Jefferies: Jacquard work, 2007