7th December 2018

I visited the BMAG and whilst wandering around the Birmingham Through the Ages exhibition, I came across a display of textiles used during WW2. I saw this absolutely beautiful housecoat made from scraps of old textiles which had derived from worn out clothing. The patches of cloth had been joined together using immaculate embroidery stitches which looked stunning. This really resonated with me as I love to reuse clothing and make it into something else. Very inspiring!

Quite a while before I even decided to do this course, I had read a rave review by Adrian Searle in the Guardian about the Anni Albers exhibition at the Tate Modern and had decided that I would visit when I got the chance. Well the chance arose and off I went to London. I wasn’t disappointed. The exhibition was very well curated and I left understanding a lot more about Albers and her work.

It was a very interesting period which Albers lived through; she was born at the turn of the 20th Century in Berlin. She was good at art and was encouraged to study drawing and painting by her middle class family, and became a student at the Bauhaus school. The Bauhaus school was set up in 1919 and Albers became a student there in 1922. Although the school was innovative and progressive in linking fine arts and crafts, Albers was not encouraged to pursue further study in painting, but channeled into studying weaving, which was known as the ‘ Women’s Workshop’. She joined it reluctantly, but together with the other women on the course, began creating wall hangings which she referred to as ‘amazing objects’, and the workshop developed it’s own language and emphasising the haptic and tactile qualities of the work. Albers later went onto develop a huge interest in pre-Columbian South American textiles, particularly in Peru which incorporated a language in to their woven textiles as they didn’t, at that time, have any kind of written language.

Albers and her husband, Josef, also an artist, were forced to leave Germany in 1933 after the school was closed following pressure due to the rise of Nazism in the country. Although Albers said she never practised the religion, she was from a Jewish family. She and Josef emigrated to the USA and both became teachers at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Whilst at the college Albers began to make what she called ‘pictorial weavings’, which were hand woven pieces made as art to be hung on a wall and not fabrics designed to be used in an everyday setting. She was innovative in her use of weaving in this way, and encouraged her students to use everyday materials and textures and incorporate them into their own work. She designed a sound-proof material which was commissioned to cover the walls of an auditorium. Albers was enthusiastic about the promotion of the use of textiles in architecture, even proposing a future whereby they became fundamental to the structural design of buildings. She suggested that a museum of textiles whereby the divisions between exhibits could be fabric and could have varying degrees of transparency or be light-reflecting. She went on to work on many architectural commissions, collaborating with architects and designers, and in 1944 she designed a drapery fabric with light-reflecting qualities for the Rockefeller Guest House in New York. Later on, in 1949 she designed and created the textiles for the rooms at the Harvard Graduate Center in Massachusetts, which had been built by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school in Germany.

By working in this way, by viewing a much wider use of textiles than traditionally understood, was looking at a new way of living, and she was very much a pioneer in this field.

Her ‘pictorial weavings’ became very well known and she was commissioned to produce a number of religious pieces (although she said she had never set foot inside a synagogue since the age of 8!). The piece known as Six Prayers, was commissioned by the Jewish Museum to create a memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and was hanging in the exhibition. This six panels of this piece were very striking; it was woven in metallic threads and when viewed from different angles reflected the light in many, many ways. Albers said that “I used the threads themselves as a sculptor or painter uses his medium to produce a scriptural effect which would bring to mind sacred texts”.

The exhibition included many of Albers’ designs for her weaving projects painted meticulously on paper. When viewed from a distant these paintings looked woven and stood out from their frames as if they consisted of a textural surface. It was only up close that I could see that they were actually paintings.

As well as being an artist and using her weaving to create works of art, Albers had studied her craft thoroughly and produced a book in 1965 entitled On Weaving. This publication explores the last 4,000 years of weaving around the world, as well as examining technical aspects of the craft and the development of the loom. She dedicated the book to her ‘great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru’, and stressed throughout the text how ancient techniques could continue to revitalise contemporary practice.

This exhibition was exciting and inspiring. I was almost aching with desire to touch the exhibits as they appeared so tactile! But, luckily for me, there was a whole room dedicated to ‘tactile sensibility’ where I could satisfy my need to touch. Also in this room was Albers Structo Artcraft handloom on which she created many of her pictorial weavings. I loved being in this room as it brought a practical dimension and was a fitting end to the exhibition and I left feeling very inspired and eager to learn more about weaving and creating textiles of my own.