Revisiting Blue

Dana Barnes

Dana Barnes is a textile designer and artist. Her work experiments with unspun natural fibers and innovative felting processes. Barnes explores different ways of forming objects using various techniques: knotting, netting, twisting and looping of fibers to create large scale textile art pieces for interior spaces. Inspired by  nature, her work references thick crop fields, grazed hills and meadows, gnarled and knobby aged oak trees, and entwined and interlocked Spanish moss.

Gunta Stölzl

Gunta Stölzl was a German textile artist who played a fundamental role in the development of the Bauhaus school’s weaving workshop. As the Bauhaus’s only female master she created enormous change within the weaving department as it transitioned from individual pictorial works to modern industrial designs. She joined the Bauhaus as a student in 1920, became a junior master in 1927 and a full master the next year. 

She was dismissed for political reasons in 1931, a year before the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazis. The textile department was a neglected part of the Bauhaus when Ms. Stölzl began her career, and its active masters were weak on the technical aspects of textile production. She soon became a mentor to other students and reopened the Bauhaus dye studios in 1921. 

After a brief departure, Stölzl became the school's weaving director in 1925 when it relocated from Weimar to Dessau and expanded the department to increase its weaving and dyeing facilities. She applied ideas from modern art to weaving, experimented with synthetic materials, and improved the department's technical instruction to include courses in mathematics. The Bauhaus weaving workshop became one of its most successful facilities under her direction.

Text: Wikipedia, Images:  As reference from multiple websites