After graduating from Secondary Textile School of Applied Arts, department Fashion Design, she worked at Art Protis Studio where she began to create modern non-woven tapestries according to copyright-protected technology. She participated, for example, in the realization of a large tapestry at the EXPO in Osaka in 1990. In 1998 she graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at FaV VUT in Brno, the field of Video – Multimedia – Performance and her videos installation were presented at different national and international festivals and exhibitions. In 2008, her “Intangible Heart”, a light box made of plexiglass and textile materials, was included among the 15 finalists of the Targetti Light Art Award international art competition.
Experience with conceptual and performance art has added new thought stimuli to her perfect knowledge of technology. She has consolidate them in Italy, where she lived for several years. The look at textile art from another far-off perspective, breaking out from work at the established Art Protis studio, liberated her creative invention. She was able to grasp this unique technology that, for many years, no significant personality has not transformed from repetitive banal schemes and clichés, in new and unconventional way. Some Art Protis cycle (The Abstract Code of Conscience) returns to the understanding of non-woven tapestries in the way it was thought by artists and theorists of the 1960s who appealed to the need to maintain the autonomous style of this technique. Its pure lines of fibres and cuts out of fabrics bring out their own language in the spirit of the best Art Protis by Antonín Kybal. Moving into a new environment and a desire to experiment, she created tapestry “My Memories”, where both base fabric and carded wool or strands of wool are missing – a collage of fragments of clothing intertwined only with silon thread gives to the art work, combining the immediacy of the creative gesture with the mechanical performance of the machine, again the contemporary art expression. Totally unique is Art Protis “Cross-Over”, working with a cobweb structure of the nylon thread that contrasts with a regular woolen fleece. Svetlana Kulíšková, as the only one, used the visual potential with a machine of knitted structure, creating the impression of a “perforation” of the woolen structure.
The Art Protis technology has not only introduced a new, up-to-date look in the form of hanging tapestries, but has also found new uses for it. She showed the potential of non-woven tapestries in the interior, whether in the form of textile partitions or upholstery fabrics. The uniqueness of Brno’s non-woven textile technology has also excited Italian fashion designers. In 2010 she started working with Dyloan Studio in Milan to develop the Arakne Non Woven project. She has produced a number of very interesting prototypes of fabrics with possibilities for use in clothing design. The experiments intriqued a number of prestigious designers (Jil Sander, Marc Jacobs, Prada), and the dress from this material appeared in the Calvin Klein collection autumn/winter 2011/2012. She has anticipated the return of interest in Art Protis after 2015. Thanks to her professional experience and enthusiasm, she excited for this technique a number of Czech fashion designers of the youngest generation who are working again with nonwoven fabrics. Her contribution to traditional Art Protis was reflected in an exhibition at the Czech Center in Milan in 2013, two years later she presented possible ways of using this technique in the field of art, interior design and fashion at the Brno – moravský Manchester, the 250 Years of the Capital of the Textile Industry in the Museum of Aplied Arts in Brno. It has been proven to be the only artist of her generation who is able to handle a non-woven fabric with a similarly monumental overlap and designer feel as the pioneer of this technique, Inez Tuschnerová.
Svetlana Kulíšková is not only an innovator of new possibilities of Art Protis. With today’s highly acclaimed theme of sustainable fashion and organic textiles, she began to work at a time when few people were interested in this issue in the Czech Republic. Both in Art Protis as in textile objects, she works with deferred pieces of clothing, recycled jute, or fabric or yarn residue. In search of their untapped potential, she is acutely aware of the dangerous overwhelming of the planet with other pieces of fabric. With new nonwoven tapestries and author’s textiles, in 2011 participated at the Design Week Milano Exhibition, Sparkling, Ecologically Correct at Fuori Salone in Tortona. The Cradle to Cradle fabric collection introduced during the Design Week 2012 in Leonardo Gardens, the Palazzo delle Stelline, or in 2013 in the Nomade showroom of the known Malìparmi fashion brand, is also based on the philosophy of upcykling. With her textile objects, she moves brilliantly in the field of arts, in addition with an ecological overlap.
Sustainable fashion is not for her a fashionable topic or a trend, but a very serious issue. In 2015 she established a multifunctional center in Brno for the renewal of the traditional sewing crafts, Brno šije – Brno sews, with the “slow fashion” philosophy. The success of this project brought her two years later to open the first innovative department Ekotextil design at secondary School of Art and Design at SSUD in Brno, where she now works as a head of the department with the mission to educate a new generation of fashion designers of sustainable fashion. She believes that education is the key to the change that today our society urgently needs.
Andrea Březinová