Threads of Timeless Tales: Textile Art, Women and Memory

In 2024, I graduated from the Fine Arts department at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague with Threads of Timeless Tales. Looking back, the project feels like an important point in the development of my practice. It was a moment when my personal relationship with textiles, my research into women and textile-making and my interest in drawing and installation came together in one body of work.

The project began with something I had known since childhood. My grandmothers in Greece introduced me to embroidery, crochet and knitting, and textiles were part of the environment in which I grew up. Over time, however, I began to look at these familiar practices differently. What had initially been something I learned from my family became a way of thinking about the histories, expectations and experiences connected to women's work.

For Threads of Timeless Tales, I became interested in the relationship between textiles and women, particularly the ways in which textile-making has historically existed within domestic life and within expectations placed upon women. At the same time, I was interested in the creative possibilities within these practices. The act of making can be repetitive and demanding, but it can also be expressive, social and deeply personal.

This tension became central to the project. I was not interested in presenting textiles simply as traditional craft, nor in separating craft from contemporary art. Instead, I wanted to look at what could happen when these histories and techniques became part of an artistic language.

The title Threads of Timeless Tales reflects my interest in the stories that can be carried through textile. A handmade object can contain much more than its physical form suggests. It can hold the time spent making it, the knowledge required to produce it and the person who passed that knowledge on. A textile can move from one generation to another, carrying something with it even when its original context has disappeared.

My research expanded beyond my own family history. I looked at mythology, literature, Greek textile traditions and feminist writing, following different threads wherever they led. Figures such as Arachne and Philomela became important to my thinking because their stories connect women, textiles, artistic expression and the power to communicate.

I was particularly drawn to the possibility of textile as a form of language. A stitch can be repetitive and almost invisible, but accumulated over time it can create an image, a pattern or an entire object. This relationship between the small gesture and the larger whole became important to the way I approached the work.

The KABK graduation catalogue describes Threads of Timeless Tales through the themes of textiles and women, Feminist discourse and Societal expectations. These themes describe an important part of my artistic research which also expand to something personal: the things we inherit without necessarily realising that we have inherited them.

KABK Graduation Catalogue — Hara Athanasopoulou

The installation became a space where these different ideas could meet. Personal memories could exist alongside historical references, familiar textile techniques could become part of contemporary art; and objects associated with domestic life could be reconsidered through a different context.

The project also changed the way I understood my own practice. I began to see that textile did not have to remain within the boundaries I had originally associated with it. It could become drawing, sculpture, installation or something that sits between these categories.

This has continued to develop since graduation. My practice now moves between textile, drawing and sculpture, and I have increasingly brought textiles into dialogue with materials such as steel and concrete. The relationship between softness and weight, domesticity and construction, inherited knowledge and contemporary materials has become another part of my work.

For that reason, I don't see Threads of Timeless Tales as a finished statement about what my work is. I see it as a collection of threads that I am still following.

Some have led somewhere unexpected. Some have changed direction. And some are still being pulled.