Textiles are one of humankind’s oldest forms of cultural expression, and women have been and remain pivotal players in this multifaceted and exacting field. In Textile Practices, designer and author Stephanie Kahnau presents 40 outstanding female textile designers of the 20th and 21st centuries and their individual methods of engaging with this fascinating medium at the intersection of craft, design, and art. Textiles are an artistic means of articulation: sensitive, political, defiant. Ever since the 1960s in particular, textile arts have become increasingly recognised and subsequently established as an art form in their own right, with female artists blowing apart traditional concepts in their work: textiles became sculptures, installations, social gestures and a medium of feminist empowerment. This current publication focuses on 40 specially selected 20th- and 21st-century female positions in Europe that evince the multifaceted development of textile expression up to the present day. The charged relationship of textile and body runs through many of the compiled works. For textiles are frequently experienced up close they touch us, literally. And it is in precisely this closeness that the functional or critical, fragile and poetic potential of many textile works unfolds.
