Ever-extending Relationships: Bauhaus, Weaving & Contemporary Legacies

by: Jade Elizabeth French , Lottie Whalen & Suzanna Petot , December 6, 2021

Jade, Lottie and Suzanna co-run the curatorial project Decorating Dissidence, which explores the conceptual, aesthetic and political qualities of craft from modernism to the contemporary. They facilitate discussions on decorative art through exhibitions, workshops, podcasts and an online journal. Their most recent exhibitions include Take Dada Seriously! It’s Worth It? (2020) and WEAVE IT! (2019), for which they also published an exhibition catalogue of the same name. Their other publications include a special issue on Women Modernists and the Decorative (2021) for Women: A Cultural Review.

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Just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialised field, can one arrive at a realisation of ever-extending relationships… traced back to the event of a thread.

Anni Albers, On Weaving

Through acts of weaving, sculpting, stitching, layering, piecing together, and unravelling, craft foregrounds its own materiality and invites us to enter it, touch it, and live with it. It is an intrinsically haptic, tender mode of making: one that opens up a space for narratives of collective memory, community, and care. This interconnectedness is one of the many ways in which the craftsperson stands in contrast to the artist in traditional hierarchies of art history: the artist is the lone genius—cerebral, isolated, and elevated above the material concerns of everyday life—whereas the craftsperson engages in manual labour, making utilitarian objects to sell, display, or simply to pass the time. In the first half of the twentieth century, the tension between art and craft came to the fore as modernism ushered in an era of clean lines, unembellished surfaces, rationality, and simplicity (an aesthetic that was coded as masculine). By contrast, craft was associated with modernism’s ‘others:’ the decorative, the feminine, and the domestic. Despite this dominant attitude, many artists (often women) worked at the dissident intersections between high art and craft, showing—in the process—that arts coded as feminine (weaving, dressmaking, interior design, for example) could also be innovative and avant-garde. These tensions were explored in Decorating Dissidence’s exhibition Weave It! (2019), which saw 16 contemporary artists and makers respond to the Bauhaus’ weaving workshop 100 years on.

For the women of the Bauhaus, the weaving workshop, which was supposed to silo their creative energies, became a site of radical experimentation. This article opens with a brief overview of the various iterations of weaving workshops at Bauhaus sites in Weimer and Dessau, before moving on to explore how both Bauhaus legacies at Black Mountain College during the mid-century, and the writings of Anni Albers, grounded the exhibition. It then moves on to present the themes and artists exhibited in Weave It! to draw ‘ever-extending relationships’ between modernist and contemporary craft-makers. The pieces exhibited took viewers on a journey from the geometric forms and minimalist rigor of the Bauhaus to tactile e-textiles and the ‘digital stratum’ on which our everyday lives are now built, placing modernism in dialogue with explorations of intimacy, migration, and community. The exhibition themes of process, movement, and form, as well as themes of community and collective making, both responded to, and expanded upon the legacies of the Bauhaus weaving workshop.

Bauhaus Blueprints: The Influence of the Weaving Workshop on the Exhibition

In 1919, the first iteration of the weaving workshop was founded at Bauhaus Weimer in Germany under Johannes Itten. During this early stage, the workshop produced decorative designs that were seen to have more in common with paintings than with the functional textiles for which they would come to be known. (Smith 2002) In 1920, the textile and weaving workshops merged, giving practitioners the chance to learn techniques such as crochet, macrame, embroidery, and spinning. Materials were first sourced from older women in Weimar, who offered old scraps to be used in new designs. (Inglesby 2020) By the time the workshop had relocated to Dessau, one might be greeted by a flurry of activity from all sides, with industrial sized machines able to create innovative designs on a mass scale. The workshop was making throws, upholstery, and wall hangings that were ready to be put to use at Haus am Horn or Sommerfeld House, two of the first collective Bauhaus undertakings. By 1926, weavers would find themselves not only working under Itten. but also being tutored under the watchful eye of Gunta Stölzl. As Stadler (2009) notes, Stölzl made a point of crossing out the word ‘student’ on her identification card, replacing it in her own handwriting with the word ‘master’, (13) taking both pride and action over her status in the school. Despite the upgraded title, Muller and Radewaldt (2019) further note that Stölzl’s salary remained lower than those of her male colleagues and offered her ‘neither the right to a pension nor a professorship’. (25) Within a decade, the weaving workshop proved to be a location that both encouraged and separated textile work through gendered divisions at the school.

As the workshop developed, many of the women creating under its remit made the weaving workshop a radical site of experimentation and exploration, including Albers, Stölzl, Michiko Yamawaki, and Lilly Reich. Over time, some women were allowed to move classes, but few opted to leave the weaving workshop—notable exceptions include Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, who transferred to the wood sculpture workshop, and Marianne Brandt, who was admitted to the metal workshop (of which she would become a deputy head). In Bauhaus Bodies (2019), Otto and Rössler suggest that we cannot read the Bauhaus without situating it in relation to a post-First World War interest in embodiment. The collection’s wide-ranging essays on the cultures of the body within Bauhaus focus on figures of the New Woman, Lebensreform (life reform), and emerging technologies. Rössler and Blümm’s essay outlines how 36.9% of the school’s students were female, with the likes of Albers, Stölzl, Brandt, Karla Grosch, and Gertrid Grunow holding leadership positions. Even so, earlier research by Anja Baumhoff (1994/2001) suggests that although the outside world might have viewed Bauhaus as progressive, the pedagogical environment was also dictated by ‘paternalism, authority, power and gender inequalities’. (2001: 170) Indeed, when Georg Muche took over as weaving master in 1921, he swore he would not ‘weave a single thread, tie a single knot, make a single textile design’. (Quoted in Weltge-Wortmann 1998: 59) The Bauhaus was a space that both encouraged women and silenced them, that provided professionalisation of their skills but also minimised their output as a gendered ‘craft’.

Another facet of the Bauhaus weaving workshop that we sought to focus on throughout the Weave It! exhibition was the way in which its makers were technologically and texturally innovative. Helene Nonné-Schmidt, a student of the weaving workshop, noted ‘the advantages of woven pictures over framed pictures is that they can be easily removed and folded into a very small space’. (Quoted in Smith 2014: 69) As such, they were a part of the fast-paced, interconnected world, along with airplanes and radio. Stölzl and Otti Berger began to explore the use of synthetic materials such as cellophane, which allowed for greater experimentation with the textiles’ visual and haptic properties, Anni Albers developed a steel wool, and Margaretha Reichardt made cellophane tenson fabrics. (Otto & Rössler 2019) The move to Dessau had certainly encouraged the weaving workshop to approach both the practical and aesthetic functions of their product. As Stölzl (1931) put it: ‘[t]he vitality of the material forces people working with textiles to try out new things daily, to readjust time and again, to live with their subject, to intensify it, to climb from experience to experience in order to do justice to the needs of our time’. The students of the weaving workshop felt their work was vital and socially motivated ‘in solving the changing problems of life and home’. (Stölzl 1931) Through textiles, Stölzl saw ways to solve technical challenges that matched and supplemented architecture, and that balanced beauty with functionality. With innovation at the forefront of their aims, the weaving workshop was not only productive and innovative, but also became one of the only schools within the Bauhaus that was financially viable.

As the workshop became increasingly experimental and pioneering in its approach, it became crucial for the Bauhaus weavers to situate and theorise their practice. In Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (2014), T’ai Smith demonstrates the ways in which weavers such as Albers, Stöltz, and Berger ‘[defied] the categorical boundaries that defined modernism’ through texts and textiles (that is, both their abstract weaving work and the manifesto-like essays and theoretical texts they produced). Indeed, it is through writing and translating the act of weaving into words that makers and theorists of craft can confront the assumption ‘that the crafts are manual or technical, but never intellectual, arts’. (Smith 2014: xxviii) In Work with Material (1938), Albers reflected on the importance of intimately knowing one’s materials in order to experiment and fully experience creativity. Dialogue between maker and material remained crucial to Alber’s lifelong relationship with weaving, evident in 1982’s Material is Metaphor where she re-emphasises ‘[w]hat I am trying to get across is that material is a means of communication’. In the same essay, Albers pinpoints an element of change—or, perhaps, a level of embodied, unconscious knowledge—that sparks this exchange between maker and material: ‘[s]omething speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed’.

This quote in particular offered a catalyst for our curatorial research, as we worked to situate the textile works featured in the Weave It! exhibition around the haptic, accidental, and fortunate opportunities offered by our makers’ materials. The artists we worked with were each responding to questions posed by their various materials (from recycled plastics to e-textiles and objects contributed by a community group), following the multiplicity of potential paths for exploration that these fabrics and items suggested. Alber’s writing offered us associative ways to think through the act of weaving and textile work. Elsewhere, in On Weaving (1965), Albers refers to the ‘ever-extending relationships’ that open out from ‘the event of the thread’. The dialogic, collaborative, ‘ever-extending’ opportunities afforded in the metaphorical spaces of Alber’s work appealed to the aims of the Weave It! Exhibition: collaboration and communication were central tenets of the practices of each artist exhibited.

To gain her diploma from Bauhaus, Albers developed a curtain using cellophane, which was at the time a new, modern material (made in 1929). The wall-covering was hung in Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundeschule (a trade union school) outside Berlin. In this piece we can clearly see evidence of the maturation of Albers’ technique during the weaving workshop’s most radical years. With its silver lustre, this piece is strikingly futuristic and cinematic, like something from the set of Metropolis or Aelita: Zakat Marsa. Albers wove together cellophane with a velvety chenille, to create a fabric that was not just attractive and modern but highly functional. In quintessential Bauhaus style, its form perfectly followed its function: designed to be hung in an auditorium, Albers’ curtain reflected light and, crucially, absorbed sound. This is a classic example of the ways that Albers’ work operates on two levels—through both the surface and the structure of her weavings, she balanced colour, pattern, material, and design to create unified works of art that were aesthetically progressive and functional. Beyond a passive experience, then, the Bauhaus weaving workshop transformed weaving into a language for the modern age, a way of interpreting, communicating, and altering perception of space. Its tutors and students demonstrated that craft could be both sensual and theoretical, an act that united hand and mind in a sophisticated display of technical mastery and idea-led innovation. Although the school’s work was cut short and its members scattered by the rise of the Nazi Party in 1933, the impact of the Bauhaus weaving workshop was far from over.

Bauhaus Legacies: Black Mountain College & the Chicago New Bauhaus

Black Mountain’s contribution was that you could live creatively simply by the way you looked at life and the way you lived it. I didn’t learn technique at Black Mountain. I learned a point of view.

Mary Gregory (The Black Mountain Project)

With the rise of fascism in Europe and the onset of the Second World War, many Bauhaus members fled to the UK and USA for safety. One significant place that attracted them was Black Mountain College in North Carolina, USA. Founded in 1933, Black Mountain College was born out of a desire to create a new type of college based on John Dewey’s principles of progressive education, where the study and practice of art were indispensable aspects of a student’s liberal arts education. Secluded in the western Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, Black Mountain College fostered a unique environment that simultaneously promoted community, individuality, and unlimited creativity. As well as drawing former members of the Bauhaus school, it also attracted young artists from across the USA who were eager for a new, progressive perspective. Josef and Anni Albers were a key part of Black Mountain College’s European refugee faculty; the offer of work at the college had allowed them to escape Nazi Germany. (Wilkins 2013: 2) With them, they brought the teachings and philosophy of the Bauhaus international style to the eager students at this rebellious and unique college, which offered an eclectic range of arts subjects, including painting, sculpture, dance, performance, film, music composition, woodwork, weaving and fashion design. Anni Albers explains in the college bulletin that ‘[t]hough a closely knit unit, Black Mountain College is far from being an exclusive group. It believes more in the breaking down of barriers than in erecting new ones. But such a unity will not be a safeguard only; it will show how one can take part in the shaping of the days to come’. (Albers 1943) In this approach, it carried forwards the Bauhaus’ democratic ethos with a more ambitious, wide-reaching approach.

The college is central to the story of American modernism, as it drew now-infamous figures in the next generation of modern artists, including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Ruth Asawa, Susan Weil, and Mary Parks Washington. Where women were barred from painting and sculpture at the Bauhaus, and pushed to weaving and craft, all students—regardless of gender—at Black Mountain College could attend Anni Albers’ workshops in their desire to pursue new ways of making forms, using colours and dimension. As head of the weaving department from 1933 to 1949, Albers continued to push the medium forward, and pioneer it as a discipline:

 the courses in textile designing and specifically in weaving are thought of as a discipline in thinking in terms of material and process of its treatment, and in an inventive response to these. The weaving workshop is considered a laboratory for experimental work in construction and design. Handlooms allow for the slow operation necessary for experimentation. (The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation 2020)

Albers understood weaving as a way both to bring artists into closer contact with their materials, and to teach a slower, more methodical approach to creative invention.

The women of Black Mountain College were integral to the arts programme of craft and design, both as faculty members and students. Pottery was taught by Karen Karnes and Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain, wood carving and furniture making by Molly Gregory, fashion design by Irene Schawinsky, book binding by Johanna Jalowetz, and leatherwork by Berta Rudofsky to name but a few. (Question Everything: The Women of BMC 2020) In theory, women were treated as equals as artists and caretakers of the college. It is important to note that despite its open attitude, not all things were equal at Black Mountain College, and it repeated some of the inequalities that marred the Bauhaus. Many of the female faculty members were not paid equally or offered similar titles as their male counterparts, leaving a lot of their work and legacy unrecognised during the time. (Roberson 2018: 13) Additionally, although it was one of the first white post-secondary institutions in the South to admit Black students during the Jim Crow era, this did not happen until the admission of Alma Stone Williams in 1944—and even then only after much deliberation between the faculty and its segregated neighbouring town. (Wilkins 2013: 9-12)

After Black Mountain College closed in 1957 (due to lack of funds, internal disputes, and the increasingly conservative atmosphere of the 1950s), its members dispersed across the USA, taking the college’s principles with them. They continued making in its free and experimental spirit, further investigating and pushing the boundaries of new materials and forms. In turn, the college’s students became mentors to the next generation of artists. For example, Karen Karnes (who is credited with initiating interest in the modern ceramic movement) moved back to her native New York and, alongside other BMC alumni, helped establish the artist community at Stony Book called The Land. (Question Everything 2020) After the death of her husband—himself a former Bauhaus student—Trude Guermonprez moved to the USA with the support of Anni Albers, and arrived at Black Mountain College to teach weaving. After the college closed, she moved to the West Coast where she became the chair of the craft and textile department at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Ruth Asawa turned to Black Mountain when her dreams of becoming an art teacher were hampered due to race. Although best known for her wire sculptures, Asawa left a huge legacy in the years after her time at Black Mountain College as a prominent proponent of arts education in California. She translated the spirit of the college’s utopian ethos into practical workshops for under-resourced schools in San Francisco during the 1960s and was ultimately successful in establishing a public arts high school in the city. (Chase 2020: 106-149)

North Carolina was not the only place in the USA to where former members of the Bauhaus relocated. A number of former Bauhaus members—or Bauhäusler as Anni Albers called them—went to Chicago, Illinois and took prominent roles in education. The New Bauhaus (today known as the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology) was established in 1937 by László Moholy-Nagy, and a year later Mies van der Rohe became Head of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), making the university a global centre of modernism in the mid-twentieth century. Weaving and Albers’ theories also played a significant role in these institutions. A new generation of makers studied new materials and innovative methods in Marli Ehrman’s weaving workshops and textile design courses. After Moholy-Nagy’s death in 1947, her students begged her to continue being their mentor; Ehrman agreed, and the group became known as ‘The Marli Weavers’. (Gotthardt 2019) They met in members’ homes to continue sessions that encouraged weavers to ‘play’ and try different tie-ups with everyday objects to achieve innovative designs.

A recent exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago showcased the influence of Marli Ehrman and the New Bauhaus legacy in artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Else Regensteiner (commonly referred to as the first lady of weaving, and a student of Ehrman) was a professor, and later director of the weaving department between 1945 and 1971. (Schneider 2019) Weaving Beyond the Bauhaus—curated by Erica Warren, Associate Curator of Textiles—specifically focuses on this unique connection between former Bauhaus members and their students, from the New Bauhaus to Black Mountain College—the sharing of knowledge and collective making. Works by artists such as Claire Zeisler, Lenore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks (who was taught by Albers at Yale University) are on display and illustrate the continued influence the Bauhaus methods and figures had on their work and the wider landscape of textile art in the USA.

The significant impact made by Albers and the Bauhaus on various arts programmes in the USA was an inspiration for our exhibition Weave It! We sought to follow up several threads that were woven through the Bauhaus’ American afterlife: the mentorship between students and teachers (as demonstrated by the Black Mountain College and New Bauhaus alumna), the continued take up of weaving and craft by female-identifying artists, and the ways in which Albers and other weaving workshop alumni encouraged textiles as a medium ideally suited for experimentation, innovation and possibility, embedding this approach within the narrative of twentieth century modern art. Furthermore, Weave It! aimed to similarly uncover the importance of sharing knowledge and collective making in the innovative practices of contemporary artists working with textile and weaving in the UK today.

It is perhaps in Julie Rose Bower’s performance at Weave It! that Bauhaus and Black Mountain College best met, as Bower staged an embodied, tactile performance drawing on Albers’s experience between both. Bower also took Albers’ architectural interventions in innovative new directions; Ticket to America, an installation in which Bower amplified the live-crochet of a curtain of sound, used the trans-migratory sonic processes of craft to situate the physicality of making in a wider exploration of migration and creation. Bower chose the name of the performance as a reference to the description of Albers’ acoustic curtain (the one she designed for the ADGB Trade Union School auditorium in Bernau in 1930) as her ‘ticket to America’. The movement, resonance, and echoes of Bower’s piece evoke Albers’ journey from the Bauhaus to the Black Mountain College, where her teachings influenced—and continue to influence—generations of textile artists. As the next section of this article discusses, this was just one of many ways that the artists exhibited at Weave It! used the Bauhaus weaving workshop as a jumping off point to stage the ‘event of the thread,’ and to create new ways of exploring the ‘ever-extending relationship’ between textiles, bodies, and the world around us.

A Tour of the Weave It! Exhibition

If we want to get from materials the sense of directness, the adventure of being close to the stuff the world is made of, we have to go back to the material itself, to its original state, and from there partake in its states of change. We use materials to satisfy our practical needs and our spiritual ones as well.

Anni Albers, ‘Work with Materials’

Taking aesthetic, political, and conceptual approaches to the act of weaving, Weave It! brought together a variety of artists whose works respond to the legacies of the Bauhaus weaving workshop and textiles more generally. The work demonstrated diverse approaches to making that touch on wider themes of process, movement, and form, as well as notions of community and collective building. At the heart of the exhibition’s development was an intention to draw out what Albers’ refers to as the ‘ever-extending relationships’ that open from ‘the event of the thread’—whether through socially-engaged community art practice, acts of assemblage that draw us closer to our environment, or dynamic dialogues between traditional and digital modes of making. Weave It! took the viewer on a journey, from the geometric forms and minimalist rigor of the Bauhaus to tactile e-textiles and the ‘digital stratum’ on which our everyday lives are now built. In the process, it placed modernism’s austere aesthetics in dialogue with contemporary explorations of intimacy, migration, and community.

In the exhibition’s first section, visitors were met with striking textile works by Michelle House and Hannah Waldron, two artists whose graphic hand-crafted pieces translate the dynamism of modern architecture into fabric designs. Waldron’s Spans series links archetypal textile design language with the built environment. The compression and extension in the compositions continues Waldron’s interest in high-speed travel, rhythm, and acceleration in relation to the process of hand weaving. Modernist velocity meets craft’s slow processes in the structure and surface of Waldron’s woven fabric. Following Albers, Waldron highlights how weaving ‘allows you to make both the structure and the surface at one, you construct the textile out of loose threads, and it’s a metamorphosis quite different from other transformative mediums’. Printmaker House is also interested in translating the dynamism of modern cityscapes in fabric. Inspired by both Anni and Josef Albers, House balances colour and abstract geometric forms. Following on from Albers’ example, Waldron and House both demonstrate the power of textiles to envision new architectural worlds and tell stories about the cities around us.

Fiona Curran’s work was placed in dialogue with House and Waldron, drawing out the ways that Curran similarly develops the ‘slow process’ of needlepoint to respond to the ever-evolving material world around us. Current’s tactile artworks are screen-sized and draw their vibrant colour-palette from the ubiquitous, unavoidable screens of digital devices. They serve as reminders of the often-overlooked processes of making that create the tablets, phones, and laptops we purchase shrink-wrapped, as well as the patterns of code that conjure up the digital world we immerse ourselves in via these devices. By transforming the digital into an abstract textile composition, Curran questions the now-dominant role of technology in mediating our experiences. Her work opens up new vistas for abstract textile art in the increasingly online, digital world we live in; using bold colour and design, it reinserts traditions of abstraction and decorative art into the contemporary. How the data arrange themselves (2017) and Radiator Assembly (2017) evoke the patterns, codes, and data that make up the architecture of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Craft and contemporary technology suddenly appear closer than we ordinarily imagine.

Mixed-media artist Seungwon Jung is similarly interested in how the digital world impacts our perceptions of time and space. Digital Strata #2 (2019) and companion piece Mound (2018) mediate between the digital and material realms to examine human existence in relation to our vast and ultimately unknowable environment. Jung’s interdisciplinary practice combines handcraft and technology, both to collapse time and space and to draw together the domestic and the global. Working from a digital image of a geological strata, she computer-generates a textile pattern, and then creates a hand-knotted rug (Mound) from the original digital image. Jung describes how ‘a pixel transforms as a cell of the textile pattern, then as a knot of the rug,’ as the digital pattern transforms into a physical object. In this way, Jung digitises the ‘event of the thread’ to offer a fresh perspective on the complex interconnections between daily life and the vast geological history of our planet. Jung’s use of digital methods does not erase the labour-intensive actions, but rather becomes another type of collaboration—or ‘ever-extending relationship’—as she seeks to ‘explore the ways how the hand and machine interact and relate to each other’.

Kristen Kong’s eye-catching woven sculptural works hung from the gallery ceiling, making an architectural intervention in the space in a style reminiscent of Albers’ wall hangings. Kong works with discarded materials, transforming leftover pieces from the plastic manufacturing process into vibrant sculptures. In Wilderness (2017), Kong knits together discarded plastic sprues, coloured acetate strips, and LED lights to create a magical glowing structure that illuminates the space around it. Channelling the ethos of the Bauhaus, Wilderness is an artfully made utilitarian object. In her use of plastic, Kong further evokes Albers’ innovative use of cellophane in her wall hangings. Kong’s work marks a crucial shift away from the utopian possibilities that cellophane and other synthetic materials offered in the early twentieth century; instead, her method of recycling and repurposing keys into the climate catastrophe and the devastation caused by plastic pollution. Despite this, both Kong and Albers engage in future-oriented dialogue with their materials, and explore how they can mediate better ways of living.

Many of the works displayed in Weave It! focussed on unravelling and reweaving the ties that connect us to the world. Through her assemblage artworks Those Long Hot Summers (2017) and Batik Orifice (2017), Madi Acharya-Baskerville considers where the boundary between the organic and manufactured lies. Acharya-Baskerville weaves together natural found materials and discarded items to foreground surprising juxtapositions of clashing surfaces: her assemblages comment on transformation of our environment as a result of excessive waste and consumption. The artist invites us to consider the lifespan of objects and the increasing grey area between natural and manmade materials.

The concept of journeys was one of the defining themes that emerged from Weave It! Movements across real and imagined landscapes recurred across a diverse range of artworks: whether through the literal historic journeys of textiles through trade or colonial exploitation, or the myriad conceptual journeys that weaving can take us on. Manamou (Mother Mine) (2019)—a hand-woven textile installation by Majeda Clarke and Charlotte Bainbridge—commemorates the travels of the refugees and migrants who are members of London’s Citizens of the World Choir. Each person contributed a small item or trinket that reminded them of home, which were then arranged onto the silk panel designed by Clarke and Bainbridge. This narrative work serves as a visual record of community, mixing collective memory with notions of home and belonging. For Clarke, who was represented elsewhere in the exhibition with her wall-hanging Albers, Rose (2019), journeys and cross-cultural dialogue are intrinsic parts of her practice. Drawing on her Bengali heritage, Clarke combines Jamdani—an exquisite hand-crafted silk made in Bangladesh—with modernist prints, to disrupt Western Euro-centric narratives of design. Her work utilises both the language of geometric abstraction and the traditional skills of regional communities in Wales and Bangladesh to map new global histories of craft and making. For Clarke, textile design is ‘a space where storytelling, making and memory meet,’ and a place where we can challenge the hierarchies of the Western art canon.

Forging new connections and telling overlooked stories is also a focus of Güzel Derman (Beautiful Cure), a documentary by Nataša Cordeaux, Cheyenne Ritfeld, and Ricarda Theobald, that was screened as part of Weave It! Güzel Derman offers an intimate glimpse into the women’s weekly handcraft workshop at Derman, a charity that promotes health and well-being among Turkish and Kurdish refugee women in Hackney, London. The viewer becomes a silent part of the knitting circle, watching as the women weave stories, songs, and craft. Knitting takes on a symbolic role, as the women come together to create a space of care and community through their communal crafting. At the Derman knitting group, craft becomes an act of collective place-making, reminding the viewer of the ways that, through making, our lives become embedded in larger social narratives.

In Güzel Derman, the viewer is reminded of the ways that craft can act as a bridge between people and cultures. This idea was developed in a different direction elsewhere in the exhibition. Sophie Skaach and Naa Teki Leber’s intensely tactile work Text and Illes (2017) was participatory, and centred the visitor’s experience. Consisting of jumpers woven from conducive yarn, this interactive installation responds to the visitor’s touch with audio recordings of poems. Text and Illes foregrounds textile’s narrative dimensions, drawing attention to the stories woven into the materials that make up our everyday lives. Like the Bauhaus makers, Skaach and Teki harness the transformative powers of good design, offering a connected, caring alternative to the traditionally hyper-masculine futurity technological innovations conjure up. Like Albers, Skaach and Leber sought the accidental connections that are conjured up by touch: ‘[w]hen we think of touch, we can understand that in a tangible way, touching the textile surfaces of the garments, feeling the wool, the knitted texture, evaluating a personal wearability comfort. But we can also speak of being touched through well composed lines of poetry. A form of touch that goes beyond the surface’.

Weave It!’s key themes and concerns were strikingly writ large during the exhibition’s launch night, through multi-disciplinary artist Raisa Kabir’s workshop, and sound-led feminist performer Julie Rose Bower‘s sonic installation. With Two Loom Cloth, Kabir staged an interactive, participatory weaving workshop in which two people wove together on a back-strap loom. This collaborative act of making opened wider explorations of spaces of care, contemplation, and healing. More interested in process than product, Two Loom Cloth provided a space for participants to reflect on the labour of their bodies and the tension moving between them. It foregrounded the embodied relationship between hands and woven material, forcing us to consider how much of themselves the maker puts into a handcrafted material. Kabir’s workshop suggests the collaborative spirit of the Bauhaus weaving workshop, whilst also encouraging us to think beyond the racist, capitalist systems of labour and commerce that modernist design is often associated with.

Conclusion

By exploring the legacy of the Bauhaus weaving workshop and its afterlife at Black Mountain College through the lens of contemporary textile practices, Weave It! opened up new avenues of exploration and research, calling for more in-depth explorations of the processes of knowledge exchange and collaboration that developed at the Bauhaus and beyond. In curating the Weave It! exhibition, we were interested in using modernist, mid-century movements and creative centres such as Bauhaus and Black Mountain College as a way of exploring the influence modernism has on makers today, as well as the ways that contemporary makers continue Albers’ practice of using textiles to make interventions into the world around us. Through their work, the exhibiting artists demonstrated the weaving workshops’ fundamental and broad-ranging influence on contemporary textile design. In this way, Weave It! highlighted the ongoing dialogues that exist between historical modernist and avant-garde craft and design movements, and contemporary practitioners. Only by thinking critically about craft and its intersections with other modes of making can we move towards a deeper understanding of these dialogues. Weave It!’s emergent threads (that is, themes of migration, community-building and movement, and moments of regeneration, renewal and interconnection) foregrounded often-overlooked narratives of art that acknowledge acts of collaboration, exchange, and ethical acts of making. In myriad ways, each artist explored the dialogic potential inherent in textiles, something that Albers gestured towards with her image of ‘ever-extending relationships’: whether between makers (as in the participants in Raisa Kabir’s workshop), or between maker and the environment (as in the work of Kristen Kong). Through a diverse range of practices, each artist embodied the innovative, multidisciplinary spirit of the Bauhaus weaving workshop by expanding on its experimental practices to craft narratives that reflect the world we live in today.