Janis Dellarte

Janis Dellarte was born in 1989, in Lisbon, where lives and works. She creates performative textile pieces, sculptural hybrids and ritualistic objects, through crochet, knitting, knotting, and her investigations of textile traditions on the verge of becoming extinct. She lived in Madrid for nine years, enrolling in Fine Arts, and moved to London in 2008. She stayed seven years, completing an Art and Design Foundation Year at the Chelsea College of Art, and specializing in knitting, with a bachelor’s degree in Textiles and Surface Design at the Buckinghamshire New University. Janis concluded a course in Experimental Jewellery at Central Saint Martins, and became a Master in Knitted Textiles, at the Royal College of Art. During the summer of 2014, Janis Dellarte came back to Portugal, traveling through its villages to learn ancestral textile techniques, which she incorporated into her work. In Lisbon, she attended the Strategy for the Contemporary Interpreter Workshop, by Vânia Rovisco, and the course on Performance of Portuguese Art: Performers and Performances, at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.  Janis works alongside designers, musicians, dancers and performers, and takes part in several artivist initiatives such as Linha Vermelha and Zero Waste Lab – for a more conscious future with less plastic. In October of this year, she moved to the Coast of Alentejo, where she surrendered to the project present at his exhibiton: rescuing plastic from the beach and knitting it together into totems, floating sculptures, wearables, objects of sound!

Janis Dellarte has exhibited in London, New York, Jalisco (Mexico), Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Porto and Lisbon. Of particular consequence are her exhibitions at Design Museum (MUDE) and the Electricity Museum (Museu da Electricidade) of Lisbon, thePalácio das Artes, the opening of Z42 at Rio de Janeiro, The Java Projects in New York, Hockney Gallery, MilMa, and Geddes Gallery, in London.