Rozanne Hawksley: Offerings

Hawksley's 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. 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.

With a Preface by Philip Hughes, Director of the Ruthin Craft Centre (and sponsor of the publication, distributed by Lund Humphries) and Foreword by Dr Ruth Richardson, author of The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy (Oxford University Press:2008), this book offers the first and only insight into the life and practice of this significant figure. Rather than a chronological biography, the structure of the book was developed to reflect the range of overlapping dynamics that inform the artist's work. In examining the basis of Hawksley's creativity, Schoeser proposes that the term, fugato, is most appropriate for the reiteration of key themes: war, death, injustice and madness.