This is the first monograph on Rozanne Hawksley (b.1931), a formidable artist who has broken down barriers through her body of mixed-media work that provides a powerful and mature narrative about war and other world events, as well as the role and fate of women. Her life trajectory offers an insight into a range of events and institutions that have shaped twentieth century art, the latter including her years at the Royal College of Art during the initiating moments of postmodernism in the early 1950s. She next designed for the Women's Home Industries, a postwar dollar-focussed project created by Lady Reading, who founded what is today the Women's Royal Voluntary Service, one of the UK's largest charities and voluntary organisations. Her years as a mature student and then tutor at Goldsmiths, in the late 1970s and 1980s, coincided with the period when the textile course there became the unrivalled centre of international influence in the textile arts. Widely acknowledged as having played a significant role in the development of interdisciplinary textile teaching, research and scholarship, her contribution to the ground-breaking 1988 exhibition, The Subversive Stitch, is regarded as seminal. Since the late eighties she has exhibited annually, showing in Japan, Europe and the United States, as well as throughout the UK. Now in her seventies and still a practising artist, her drawings are haunting, her installations and sculpture, often controversial. Much of her art, because it is shown as installations, has no permanent existence except in photographs, and many other pieces have never been seen at all. This book offers the first and only insight into the life and practice of this significant figure, who through both her teaching and her practice has exercised a quiet but pervasive influence on several generations of students, teachers and practitioners over the past thirty years.

Author Biography

Mary Schoeser is a freelance writer and curator specialising in the decorative arts. She is also a senior research fellow at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London. Her publications include World Textiles: A Concise History (2003), a profile of the artist, Norma Starszakowna (2005) and Silk (2007).