Meet the Maker behind Yolanda Zarins
MEET YOLANDA
Creating magic from her Hobart Studio, Yolanda Zarins designs Tasmanian-centric textiles, finding inspiration from the natural environment within Tasmania.
“I feel most at home outdoors and exploring, either bushwalking or driving roads deep into the wild landscape here.” – Yolanda Zarins
If you have ever been to Tasmania or even seen photos, you will know how lush, abundant and unique the flora is. Yolanda’s textile collection we believe makes a beautiful tribute to the misty and wild natural environment of the State. Tasmanian residents and visitors have resonated with Yolanda’s designs and their inherent sense of place.
THE EVOLUTION OF YOLANDA ZARINS
When Yolanda started making textiles under her self-titled brand in 2015, she began by using the traditional printing and dyeing techniques of screen printing. The nature of handmade items meant the tone and colour would uniquely vary within each print run.
“This technique was sometimes challenging to communicate with my customers who wanted consistency” Yolanda explains.
Alongside the ‘inconsistency’ of this process, it was a very labour-intensive process and with a baby, Yolanda realised that something needed to change within her practice.
In 2020, she relaunched all of her designs as high quality, digital prints onto natural fibres, all ethically made in Australia. Through retaining traditional mark making and illustration techniques within a digital print process, Yolanda has been able to achieve a hybrid form of digital craftsmanship.
“Although it was a long journey from a very purist handmade process to a hybrid approach…the relationship between handmade and digital is something I continue to be interested to explore in my work”
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yolanda enjoys exploring ways to express variation in repetition and always aims to retain the beautiful handmade marks found in sketches and printmaking techniques.
Her process currently achieves this through etching designs onto plastic then applying ink, before capturing the design through scanning where she then washes the colour off and starts again.
This digital and analogue process allows limitless variations of a single motif where Yolanda has the means to express a huge breadth of unique marks without restriction in her textile designs.
“One of my lecturers at uni made the statement that a good textile design may be defined as one where it is not easy to pick out the boundaries of the repeat. That is, the eye travels across the length of fabric with ease without stopping or starting abruptly. This idea has always stuck with me and was reinforced through countless hours at the print table and dye bath, finding pleasant surprises in variations of the textiles I was making.”
Yolanda fell in love with this visual flow of traditional techniques and continues to explore this concept in new designs, hoping to make it a signature style of her studio.
Interior Designer – Darren James Interiors
SUSTAINABILITY & CONNECTION TO THE CREATOR
As part of Yolanda’s transition to digital print came the reduced environmental impact, now allowing fabric to be printed to order and hence reducing waste.
She works with environmentally and ethically accredited printers in Australia as well as designers who use any textile waste in projects.
Yolanda believes the hand of the maker needs to be elevated and celebrated as storytelling, as the human elements are what makes the things we have valuable and special.
“We live in a world of availability, and mass production which ultimately devalues the things we have. To be a conscious consumer of objects and design is to consider ‘who made this, where, and how?”
There is such a strong message in this and it’s why we are passionate about connecting our users to our makers.
We were so grateful to receive Yolanda’s new collection at the beginning of this year and we along with Yolanda are continually inspired by the designers who apply Yolanda Zarins textiles in creative ways.
“I really love this image from Darren James Interiors. It lights me up because the designer saw my work in a way that I hadn’t before and really celebrated it in this space.”
View Yolanda’s full fabric collection here.