Britta Ankenbauer

A My artistic career began slowly by working on some few textile works/quilts for exhibitions, winning some prizes and being asked to teach classes. I love experimentation to explore the fiber and art world. Years later, after working through a lot of techniques and ideas, I felt stuck in my own processes. I searched for my personal artistic voice and I started to study at an art school. I installed a professional studio, started to exhibit more and to work as a professional artist to make a living from my work. I had the luck to find a place in the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, a place where a lot of artists work and the galleries show contemporary work, often paintings and installation. Currently I still make textile wall hangings but started in the last years to concentrate  more on installations of fragments and to explore deconstruction. I even made two huge 3 meter paintings at an artist in residence project at Leipzig.

As artist I am very interested in the meeting points of different approaches, therefore I am mostly interested in combines of techniques. My new work tells about memories and changes. It is blurred, faded work, imagery of memories that we want to capture. In the last several years, my work has changed towards more stitching and I started to mix drawing, printing and painting methods with textile techniques. Even if I am a big fan of sketchbook work (I even wrote a book about) I often felt bored by transferring my sketches onto cloth later. The passionate process of mark making is interrupted and the original drawing loses strength by transferring it onto cloth. What will happen if we start to integrate our original sketches onto cloth? I started a series to make sketches directly on the cloth, using pencil and “no go” methods. That experimentation is currently not finished. My new solo show tells about “Echo” of our history and personal memories that our brain changes into smaller or bigger echoes.  I am very glad to have found a mixture of “letting go” and of planning. The outcome often changes my direction, but not my concept.

In 2007 I began to teach regularly and founded a special long lasting formation in textile arts, the Masterclass concept. 12 years of interested students who progressed a during that year a lot.  As I am also trained in adult education and as professional coach I have professional skills to support people and groups to find their personal voice. I wanted to give people a platform that I didn’t have at the beginning of my career. I support people to study more deeply their own artistic ideas and to progress in terms of skills but also in terms of developing their own ideas and approaches. Later, as I cannot teach every class I am asked for, I wrote two (self published) books, the third is currently on my desk to be published next year.