WEAVE IT! – 100 Years of Bauhaus

To celebrate 100 years of Bauhaus, Decorating Dissidence brought together performance artists, visual artists, community groups and craft practitioners as a response to the women’s weaving workshop…

The women of the Bauhaus had no real other choice but to work in weaving. As painter, Oskar Schlemmer, said in 1920: ‘Where there’s wool, there’s also a woman who will spin it, even if it is just to pass the time’. The weaving workshop that emerged in the Bauhaus was artistically progressive but lacking in gender parity. Yet, many made it a radical site of experimentation and exploration including Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Michiko Yamawaki, and Lilly Reich.

This exhibition considered the legacies of crafting, textiles and weaving from modernism to the contemporary, both celebrating and challenging the avant-garde work of the weaving workshop.

‘Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed’
– Anni Albers, ‘Material as Metaphor’ (1982)