Ceara Lile is a fibre-based mixed media artist who grew up in West Auckland. She creates abstract textile collages layered with meaning, memory, and emotion as well as eco inkless hand printed fabrics. She now lives in Keri Keri in the Far North of Aotearoa NZ with her partner Mario.
From an early age, Ceara has been captivated by textiles, drawn to their textures and versatility. Her work takes the form of abstract, collage-based fibre sketches, where these materials serve as both her medium and her tool. Caera creates layered backdrops, using these elements to build a rich foundation, then draw over them—playing with color and form to evoke places, emotions, and relationships.
At the heart of her work is a deep fascination with the human experience, particularly the ways in which we seek connection and belonging, both in physical spaces and within society.
I loved meeting and talking to Ceara. She shares how she got back to creating after a break away travelling after completing a fashion degree. We discuss how her love of maths and her fashion degree has informed her work, the process of abstract art and how abstract works often have a 'teenage stage' before reaching a satisfying completion and the mathematical problem solving that is often part of the abstract process.
Ceara goes into fascinating detail about her inkless printing process, from collecting rusty iron and bark and creating pigments to how she chooses the leaves and how each leaf responds to the dying process. We also talk about her 2 other series of works, changing Landscapes and The Venn Of Us, which are fabric collages using repeated shapes and hand stitched lines.
Ceara explains the ideas and the meanings of the codes that appear on her fabric collage works, we go to the craft versus art conundrum and her shifting attitude of "it's just clothes" to seeing her work as art and herself as an artist.
https://www.creativeconnections.nz/post/ceara-lile-textile-artist
Ngā mihi, thanks for listening!
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