This is the first monograph on Rozanne Hawksley, 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. 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.
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