Marisa Ranalli is a textile artist who incorporates electronics into her artwork. She works with human interaction and how it relates to themes of deep sea life, human biology, and light. Marisa uses felt and silk to create three dimensional, wearable forms. Siphonophorae is the culmination of Marisa’s research over the past 5 years. Siphonophorae’s [...]
Many different types of creatures have innate defense mechanisms to help them to survive. My inspiration is drawn from sea creatures – most specifically, jellyfish, sea urchins, and puffer fish. Puffer fish are known for being able to fill themselves up with water or air to produce sharp spines that cover their bodies. I have [...]
The new website redesign has been launched! I’ve been working on this for the past few months, trying to make sure that everything is organized and user friendly. The new layout better reflects the kind of textile work that I create. I’ve made a few changes and added some new things. The Illustration section has [...]
Working on a new project dealing with interaction between two garments. I love working on knitting machines.
My work tends to be derived from my fascination with the inside. The inside of machines, the inside of the human body, the inside of our thoughts; these are all things that are generally hidden, intentionally or otherwise. The necessity or possibility of destruction frightens us away from ever really being able to see these [...]
This is my graduation show, where I will be showing a project that I have been working on since January. This is a pretty important show for me. INmaterial An Exhibition of Emerging Craftspeople On at the Lennox Contemporary Gallery April 30th – May 10th 2009 Opening Reception: April 30th 2009. 7-10pm. United by a [...]
I finished this project a few days ago. It’s knitted and crocheted, with electrical wire and normal wool yarn. I’ve uploaded some finished pictures, and some pictures from the making of it as well. I called it the Cyborg Scarf because I wanted it to look like a really elegant scarf from first glance, but [...]
Working on a project! Hope to have it done in a few days, hooray!
How It Works The skirt is turned on by a conductive velcro switch. When the velcro is fastened, the white lights on the skirt turn on. There’s a switch inside the left shoe. When you step with your left foot, it puts pressure on the switch and activates a wireless transmitter that sends a signal [...]
To the left is an invite for the Super Wired exhibition at the the Textile Museum of Canada. The opening reception is tomorrow night from 6-7:30pm and my piece will be on display until the beginning of June. Last year, I was chosen to participate in a project called ‘Digital Threads’. In October 2007, I [...]
