Profile

As an artist and weaver, Hannah White has a fascination with how constructed textiles can create sculptural forms. Her work investigates the interplay between the structure of her woven fabrics, material characteristics, form and light. Through materials-led exploration, Hannah aims to discover fresh making approaches to traditional textile techniques, often using cross-disciplinary materials and processes.

Hannah’s sculptural artworks evolve through a process of manipulating her fabrics into organic forms, allowing the qualities of the cloth to influence their shapes. During her Doctorate, Hannah undertook an apprenticeship at an electroforming workshop. By combining this new knowledge with over 20 years’ experience as a weaver, she created a hybrid material process which grows a metal skeleton within her woven fabrics, called ‘Metal Integral Skeleton Textiles’. This enables selective areas within the textiles to become rigid and self-supporting. The hard metal provides structure, whereas the fluid textile allows areas to compress and fold to create sculptural forms. White describes her process as ‘engineering with thread’.

Hannah’s ‘Ammonite Shadow’ series is inspired by the sculptural qualities of Ammonite fossils. The pleated forms spiral and curve, creating contemporary textile fossils. Different lighting conditions enhances the work. As the sunlight moves across each piece it creates a series of changing shadows at different times throughout the day, emphasising the form. Directional light creates dramatic crisp shadows, adding another dimension.

When creating the patterns within her woven fabrics, Hannah considers how these colourations will be affected when they are transformed into three-dimensions. As the woven patterns follow the undulating contours and swirling forms, distinctive markings appear, making each unique piece.

The monochrome colours draw influences from the illustrations of 19th Century geology artists, such as Ernst Haeckel, who captured Ammonites’ sculptural qualities in exquisite detail. The copper and blue tones reference the hues created by mineral deposits found in ammonites discovered within specific rock substrates.

Hannah has exhibited work at Collect International Art Fair for Contemporary Craft and Design, The Royal Society of Arts, Contemporary Applied Arts, Gallery 57 and Cite Internationale de la dentelle et de la mode de Calais, France. 

Hannah gained a 1st Class (Hons) Degree in Textiles Design in 1998, an MA in Design for Textiles Futures from Central Saint Martins in 2001 and a Doctorate in Textiles Innovation at the Royal College of Art in 2019.