Rozanne Hawksley (1931–2021) once described her work as comprised of the “decaying fabrics of life and death.” This was both a literal and metaphorical statement. Hawksley was well-known for her death-related artworks that employ textiles including velvet and silk, as well as other materials such as animal bones, jewels, sequins, and wood. The glove was a major motif in her oeuvre beginning in the 1950s. Pennina Barnett chose Pale Armistice: In Death Only Are We United (1986–87), a wreath of white gloves adorned with lilies and bleached animal bones, for the ground-breaking Subversive Stitch exhibition at Manchester’s Cornerhouse Gallery in 1988. Hawksley is now recognized as one of the stand-out artists of that exhibition, and Pale Armistice was acquired by the Embroiderers’ Guild for its collection. The Imperial War Museum subsequently commissioned another version of Pale Armistice in 1991. Pale Armistice, like several other of her textile works, memorialized those killed in armed conflict.
Philip Hughes, director of the Ruthin Craft Centre, has observed that Hawksley’s body of work is characterized by opulence, horror, decadence, and theatre. Although she experienced a great deal of tragedy and illness during her life, Hawksley’s art is often informed by humour as well as pathos, for instance in the title of the sumptuous glove work Aimez-vous le big Mac? (2008), which incorporated silk chiffon and black fabric woven with gold thread that was being worked into a dress by a woman who had died.
In an interview, artist and Goldsmiths instructor Audrey Walker told Mary Schoeser that Hawksley’s work is remarkable for its “courage” and “[lack of] compromises.” Hawksley was one of the artists interviewed for Narrative Threads, the oral histories project at the Constance Howard Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was one of the feminist artists coming out of Goldsmiths in the 1970s, along with Walker, Janis Jefferies, and Eirian Short. Part of this experimental group of artists, Hawksley once stated that “all work is a risk.” This could be said for all artists working with textiles, given the continued marginalization of textile artists by some institutions. Although I never met Hawksley in person, after I wrote about her work in 2017, the artist sent me a few very kind emails. In one, she wrote: “I am delighted and somewhat overwhelmed… It is very rewarding as I often looked on with almost horror” when her work was described as "not embroidery.” Noting that she had felt “ignored” and “rejected” during her career, she was keenly aware that while her choice of textiles meant that her work would not be taken seriously by some critics and art historians, she also knew that because of how she worked with textiles, other commentators would reject her work as not truly “textile art.” Of the individuals, such as Mary Schoeser, who had written about her work, Hawksley added: “I owe a great deal to those who felt there was something there.” In her conversation with Schoeser, Audrey Walker remarked: “Over the years [Hawksley] has exploded any pre-conceived notions of what a ‘textile work’ can be, in either form or subject matter…It exists in that perilous area where categorisation is impossible, and, as such, it continues to challenge us all.”
Hawksley was born Rozanne Pibworth on 18 February 1931 in Portsmouth, Hampshire. Her maternal grandmother made a living as a seamstress working for a naval outfitter. Growing up in Portsmouth—which was an important naval site during the First World War and had been bombed during the blitz of the Second World War—was formative for Hawksley’s art praxis and her vision of humanity as both flawed and fragile. Her works were usually discussed in terms of grief, mourning and anger about the suffering caused by war.
She finished a national diploma in design at the Southern College of Art in Portsmouth in 1951, later completing the three-year degree course in fashion at the Royal College of Art in London. From 1964 until 1967, Hawksley worked as a designer and tutor of needlework at the American Needlework Center in Washington, D.C. During her long career, Hawksley also taught at Guildford, and then at Goldsmiths in the late 1970s and 1980s, after completing a postgraduate diploma in textiles at that institution. When she left London in 1987 for Newport in west Wales, she continued to act as a visiting tutor and examiner at Goldsmiths, the Slade, and the Royal College of Art.
In 2006–2007, Hawksley produced The Seamstress and the Sea, a work that memorialized her grandmother’s craft skills, and which was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum. It was later purchased by the National Maritime Museum. In 2009, there was a major retrospective of Hawksley’s artworks at the Ruthin Craft Centre in north Wales entitled Offerings. As Sue Rowley has observed: “Craftwork teaches us to die, and by doing so teaches us to live.”
Hawksley’s works are now in the collections of the Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool), the Crafts Council, the National Maritime Museum, and the Museum of the Mind, Bethlem Royal hospital.
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Julia Skelly
Julia Skelly (Concordia University) specializes in feminist art and art history, textiles, addiction, decadence, and excess. Her publications include Wasted Looks: Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919 (2014), Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (2017), the edited collection The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010 (2014), and Skin Crafts: Affect, Violence and Materiality in Global Contemporary Art (2022). She is currently working on two book-length projects: one on Black women and textiles, the other on queer/feminist/anti-racist tattoos.