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…
Category Archives: WOMEN IN ART
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…
“My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.” Agnes Martin’s world is one of order and tranquillity, as minutely patterned grids and ruler straight bands expand across vast surfaces suggesting wide open space. Yet there is also sensitive musicality at play as lines tremble and…
New York based textile designer and artist Caroline Kaufman takes a free-wheeling, experimental approach to creating textiles, working in an improvisatory way to produce surprising and unexpected results. She is perhaps best known for her recent, wildly complex tufted textiles, which play with madcap colour schemes and zany patterns to produce functional rugs that look…
Bauhaus textile artist and weaver Otti Berger was one of the greatest innovators of her generation, producing a dazzling array of complex and intricate fabrics that have inspired generations since. During her time as a student and later a teacher with the legendary German Bauhaus school she was endlessly inventive, experimenting wildly with weaving methods…
A self-proclaimed ‘late developer,’ fibre artist Claire Zeisler hit her stride during the early 1960s when she was nearly 60 years old, taking the United States art world by storm. Along with her contemporaries Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks, Zeisler became an outspoken, radical pioneer in the Fibre Art movement, taking the historical tradition of…
American textile artist Ethel Stein merged historical weaving techniques with dazzling geometric designs influenced by the Bauhaus School in a career spanning more than six decades. Throughout this time, she demonstrated a remarkable ability to weave simple, elegant designs that balance ordered geometry with off-kilter, destabilized elements of chaos. Little wonder then, that her art…
German textile artist Gunta Stölzl was a remarkable early 20th century weaver with an innate sensibility for the sensuous, tactile qualities of weaving. Her fantastically complex designs are a true feast for the eyes, and even today appear remarkably fresh, with their dizzying geometric patterns, shapes and colours that seem to buzz and hum with…
Known today as the “mother of modern weaving,” Dorothy Liebes had a monumental impact on textile design. She sparked a new wave of fabric production with her unconventional materials, unusual textures and boldly imaginative motifs. During her lifetime she became one of most successful and influential designers of the entire 20th century, with an incredible…
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