Name Ilse Randow | ||
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Ilse Amalie Mathilde von Randow (née Henneberg, 12 June 1901 – 18 October 1998) was a New Zealand weaver.
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Life and career
Von Randow was born in Giessen, Germany in 1901. Her family was actively involved in artistic and scientific culture, and in 1917 von Randow enrolled at the Berbenich art school in Darmstadt, where she studied until 1919 when changes in her family finances meant she left university and returned home, taking up a job as a medical illustrator at Giessen university.
In 1927 von Randow moved to China, to become a laboratory technician at T’ung-Chi university, a German-language institute near Shanghai. She married Elgar Armin von Randow, German vice consul to Shanghai, in 1935: the couple had two sons, and divorced in 1945. Von Randow had been taught to weave by her mother and she turned to these skills to support herself and her children, designing fabrics for local textile companies.
In 1949, when the communists took power in Shanghai in the Shanghai Campaign, von Randow sought refugee status for herself and her sons in New Zealand. They arrived in Auckland in April 1952.
In Auckland von Randow quickly established herself as a leading figure in modernist craft, exhibiting widely and establishing a studio at the Auckland City Art Gallery where she taught younger weavers including Zena Abbott and Ida Lough.
In the mid 1960s von Randow became disillusioned with what she saw as an anti-modernist attitude amongst craft practitioners in New Zealand. In 1966 she left for England, settling in West Mersea, where she retired from weaving and took up first batik and later painting.
In 1992 von Randow returned to New Zealand. A retrospective of her work was held at the Auckland War Memorial Museum in 1998. She donated her workbooks and weaving samples from the length of her career to the museum, to which she donated her workbooks and collection of weaving samples documenting her entire career.
Von Randow died in Auckland on 18 October 1998.
Major work
Von Randow's major public work was a set of curtains commissioned for the Auckland City Art Gallery in December 1957. Completed in 1958, the curtains were the largest piece of handweaving created in New Zealand at that date. The curtains are now held in the collection of the Auckland Museum.
In 2013 von Randow's curatins were the subject of a project at the Auckland Art Gallery by contemporary New Zealand artist Ruth Buchanan.