Anna Champeney launches new “Haiku” Art Textile series at Revelations, Paris 21-25 May 2025
Anna Champeney is delighted to be launching a new Art Textile series, “Haiku”, with SACo,
at Revelations at the Grand Palais Paris 21-25 May 2025
She is exhibiting alongside her wonderful colleagues at SACo, the creative community of contemporary makers united by a
commitment to mastery, design and innovation in fine Spanish craft (Stand 22).
NEW WORK – “HAIKU” SERIES
Anna´s new series is entitled Haiku, after the traditional Japanese poetry form written in 3 short lines.
The textiles seek to express the essential in a similarly minimalist or “close-up” way.
In these pieces the placement of every weft thread in the textile invites a conscious act of reflection.
Every change in the interlacements of the threads assumes a degree of visual power that is unusual in weave;
it is possible to construct a textile “poem” with just 3 lines of weaving echoing the 3 lines of text which comprise a written Haiku.
The visual effect of some pieces, similar to Japanese Ikat weaving, is a further homage to the attention to detail in traditional fine Japanese craft.
A NEW DIRECTION IN WOVEN ART TEXTILES
Haiku represents a radical new departure in Anna´s textiles, confidently pushing weave into a new, expressive territory
with the development of a sensitive and personal approach to woven textile language.
Some of the works possess a strong oneiric quality with the delicate fragility and beauty of cobweb.
WOVEN NARRATIVES IN TEXTILE ART
If Anna is using weave as metaphor then she is also using textile narratives which double back to the very language of loom-woven threads itself.
She uses weave to create pieces which question textile´s own origins as text (from texere in latin, “to weave”).
She speculates about the very origins of language and its potential as alternatives to words-based language,
as with the complex pre-Hispanic Inca Quipu knotted inventories which have inspired her work.
ON PROCESS
Anna has been a strong proponent of reflective, materials-based textile practice in Spain for decades,
allowing threads and processes to interact with her ideas and concepts to influence the final work.
Thus Anna works “in direct dialogue” with textile materials and processes on manual looms,
exploring happy accidents, and practicing alert and non-judgmental but analytical observation.
Anna consciously seeks out effects that weavers around the world have experienced and observed for millenia
– to harness them for their expressive and narrative potential.
See Anna´s Haiku series at Revelations, Paris – Stand 22