Petra Hilgers West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

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I’m a textile artist and award-winning poet who blends photography and collage-making into my creativity. My art draws on the daily human experiences especially the tough stuff that’s easily pushed out of sight, earshot, to the margins. First and foremost, my art is witnessing: seeing, hearing, noticing, bearing with – without having to find answers, without saving, without turning away.

Growing up in a very creative and resourceful home in what was then West Germany, I was constantly surrounded by making, mending and crafting: that’s where I learned to knit and crochet, was encouraged to write letters to a pen friend in East Germany and stories for my grandmother, taught to use coping saw and paint brushes, and spent many a winter evening making paper craft decorations.

Most of these creative activities I dropped at some point but textiles stayed with me until repetitive strain injury in my wrist took the joy out of it, and I decided to take up hand-spinning and completed a Level-3 accreditation in it. Through this I discovered the near endless possibilities of designing yarn and creating small, focused sculptural pieces: inspired by the work of textile artist Shauna Richardson who has taken ‘cute’ and ‘hobby’ out of crocheting, promoting its artistic power and visceral beauty I’ve designed yarns for artworks that respond to traumatic moments – like a friend’s heart attack or another friend’s death from a brain tumour – as well as collective trauma – like the transatlantic slave trade grown into the very fibre of cotton which I’ve spun and crocheted into an anatomic human spine, or the covid pandemic that I’ve summed up in a pair of lungs.

When I gave up “mass-”knitting and -crocheting, I also picked up writing again as well as photography, and my artistic making always goes hand in hand with approaching new work through text and photography or other visual material.