French dressmaker Madame Alix Grès made her name in the mid-20th century with sleek, minimal garments that mimed the slender, vertical lines of Greco-Roman architecture. An outlier in the fashion world, she eschewed mid-20th century trends for a timeless elegance, forging her own singular path. Madame Grès’s aspirations to become a sculptor were quashed by…
Category Archives: WOMEN IN ART
From vast, cascading curtains of silk to hand-woven fishing nets, contemporary artist Carolina Caycedo has worked with a wide range of fabrics and textiles, deftly interweaving their tactile properties into her conceptual practice. Her most recent art is an examination into the social divisions and oppressions surrounding the privatization of water, working closely with communities…
Japanese contemporary artist Yoko Daihara makes brilliantly colourful, map-like artworks that explore the boundaries between digital and analogue technology. She translates her own drawings and digital images into densely worked, tactile wool textiles, which have the look and feel of paintings, prompting some to call her art ‘woven paintings’. The imagery in her curious worlds…
In 2013, Argentinian artist Marta Minujin celebrated her 70th birthday by ‘marrying’ art. She staged a huge wedding party at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), during which she was carried around in a horse drawn carriage wearing a lavish white dress. It is a fitting introduction to Minujin’s madcap, eccentric world,…
Cecilia Vicuña has made a lifelong mission to reinvent the quipu, (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language) an ancient system of coloured, knotted threads from the Andean mountains, once used for keeping records, telling stories, recording communal rules, and even writing poems. Throughout her career, which has spanned more than five decades, she has produced…
The soft sculptures of Maria A. Guzmán Capron depict larger-than-life curvy, vibrant characters whose joyful effervescence reflects the rich complexity of Capron’s multicultural identity, which spans Europe, South America and the United States. She says, “I need a variety of sources, because that is the only way I will approximate the complexity of a self…
There is a curious and unexpected dichotomy between sound and fabric in the art of Vivian Caccuri, inviting us to consider the ways in which the two are more closely interrelated than we might at first think. Primarily a sound-based artist, her recent forays into textiles has provided a tactile and sensorial element to her…
Hailing from Johannesburg, textile artist Billie Zangewa makes intricate stitched collages from raw silk that celebrate the joys and struggles of her life as a black woman and mother. Her work reflects on the ways in which black women’s wider political status bleeds into their everyday lives, a process she calls “daily feminism.” Yet there…
Egyptian-French artist Ghada Amer has a widely varied practice spanning sculpture, printmaking, video and installation, but she is arguably best known for her alternative embroidered paintings. From a distance, they might look like expressionistic canvases, but peek closer and they are laced with hidden elements of erotica aimed not for the male gaze, but for…
Swiss designer and artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp was one of the most significant and influential voices of the early 20th century, with a multidisciplinary practice that spanned embroidery, beadwork, textiles, painting, sculpture, furniture design and more. She successfully blurred the boundaries between fine art and design, bringing the same inventive, playful and instantly eye-catching brand of…
In Hannah Hoch’s collage wonderland anything is possible; men’s faces sprout wings and chase primeval monsters, broken artefacts assemble into beasts and women’s bodies are cut apart and left to float in space. She wrote: “…there are no limits to the materials available for pictorial collages – above all they can be found in photography,…
Legendary, charismatic textile artist Nike Davies-Okundaye has led a live that is as colourful and eventful as her art. Now recognised as one of Nigeria’s foremost textiles artists, she has spent the last five decades successfully invigorating the traditional techniques of batik and adire, merging them with shimmering passages of embroidery and intricate patchworks loaded…
British-based, self-proclaimed ‘slow-stitcher’ Jessie Cutts is founder of the eccentric textile company Cutts & Sons, for which she produces hand-made, intricate quilts, wall-hangings and fabric-based artworks with a rich and deeply tactile quality. “There’s no mass-production here!” she says. Instead, each fabric piece is carefully crafted from a blend of natural, sustainable fabrics, many of…
Op artist Bridget Riley is a true icon of British art, whose daring and experimental ‘heat-haze’ patterns impacted a huge range of art movements including Pop Art, Minimalism, and Contemporary Art. But her influence also extended far beyond the art world, crossing over into the realms of graphics, architecture, and perhaps most prominently, fashion and…
The weaving workshop at the Bauhaus was a hotbed of creative talent, where some of the most significant weavers and textile designers of the entire 20th century began their careers. Among their prestigious alumni are Anni Albers, Gunta Stolzl, Otti Berger, Marli Ehrman, Benita Otte and Margarete Koehler. Most women who applied to attend the…
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