Items25The creator’s order
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William MorrisBorn 24 Mar 1834Morris taught himself to dye with indigo and madder when commercial chemical colours disappointed him, working at Thomas Wardle's dyeworks in Leek before setting up his own vats at Merton Abbey in 1881. That hands-on research gave his printed cottons, such as Strawberry Thief, their depth of…0i - 2
Jessie NewberyBorn 28 May 1864Newbery founded the embroidery department at the Glasgow School of Art in 1894 and turned needlework from a drawing-room accomplishment into a design discipline. Her style, appliqué of linen shapes outlined in stitching, stylised roses and lettering worked into collars and cushions, became a…0i - 3
Mariano Fortuny (designer)Fortuny's Delphos gown, patented in 1909 and inspired by the Charioteer of Delphi, is a column of finely pleated silk so supple it can be twisted into a coil and stored in a hatbox; the exact pleating method is still debated. He developed it in his Venetian palazzo with his partner and collaborator…0i - 4
Ethel MairetMairet's workshop, Gospels, in Ditchling, Sussex, made hand-weaving a modern craft rather than a nostalgic one. She researched natural dyes in Sri Lanka and India and wrote the influential A Book on Vegetable Dyes in 1916, then wove experimental cloths mixing wool with cellophane, metal threads and…0i - 5
Sonia DelaunayBorn 14 Nov 1885Delaunay's abstract painting began with a textile: a patchwork cot blanket she sewed for her baby son in 1911, its blocks of colour reminding her of Cubist painting. From there she and her husband Robert developed Simultanism, and she carried it straight onto fabric, designing printed silks for the…0i - 6
Hannah RyggenRyggen wove the news. On a farm by a Norwegian fjord she spun, dyed and wove her own wool, often without a preliminary cartoon, and used the loom to attack fascism as it happened: Ethiopia, 1935, shows Mussolini with a spear through his head, and other tapestries confront Hitler, Franco and the…0i - 7
Gunta StölzlBorn 5 Mar 1897Stölzl ran the Bauhaus weaving workshop from 1926, the first woman to become a Bauhaus master, and turned it from a craft class into a laboratory for industrial textiles: new synthetic yarns, sound-absorbing and light-reflecting fabrics, and patterns designed for machine production and sold under…0i - 8
Anni AlbersBorn 12 Jun 1899Albers's Bauhaus diploma piece of 1930 was a wall covering for an auditorium, woven from cotton and cellophane to absorb sound and reflect light, and that practical genius ran through her career alongside abstract pictorial weavings such as Six Prayers. In 1949 she became the first textile artist…0i - 9
Lenore TawneyBorn 10 May 1907Tawney took weaving off the wall and into the air. In her Coenties Slip studio in lower Manhattan, a neighbour of Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, she developed open-warp weavings in the early 1960s, tall narrow forms where sections of bare thread let light through, using an adapted loom and a…0i - 10
Ruth AsawaBorn 24 Jan 1926Asawa crocheted with wire. She learned the looped technique from basket makers in Toluca, Mexico, in 1947, while still a student at Black Mountain College, and used it to make hanging sculptures of interlocking lobes, transparent forms within forms whose shadows matter as much as the metal. Her…0i
