Katie Schwab works with textiles, furniture and moving image within a practice that spans exhibition making, workshops community projects and design commissions. She is interested in underrepresented histories of domestic and civic design and interweaves personal, social and craft-based histories, often drawing from marginalised and overlooked traditions of living, making and working collectively. Working frequently in collaborative and context-responsive ways, Schwab’s projects typically grow through extensive archival research and corresponding active learning within the spheres of craft production. Influenced by design-based thinking and socially engaged practices, her projects make visible their material compositions and modes of production, foregrounding the people and processes involved in shaping new bodies of work.

Following a very intense period of production and exhibition making, this residency will allow the artist to reflect on recent projects and develop research initiated in 2019 into family histories of German Jewish textile manufacturing, the woven murals of emigré designer Hans Tisdall and the Cryséde textile factory in St. Ives. Being based at Cove Park will also allow Schwab to explore archival material on Tisdall held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Image: Double Quilt (St Ives/ Plymouth/ London), 2017-19, (photo: Andy Ford)