Biography

Hillu Liebelt was born in Germany in 1959 and moved to London in 1980. After an initial training as a designer for shop interiors and window display in her native country she studied tapestry weaving when she came to England. Her work has been exhibited in Britain, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Spain and Japan and has been featured in magazines and newspapers in Britain, Germany and Holland, as well as in a book published in Japan (2005): ‘Artists’ Studios in London’.

She has been teaching tapestry classes since 1994, gave lectures and has held workshops in Britain, the Netherlands and Japan. Membership includes the London Guild of Weavers, the European Textile Network (ETN) and the British Tapestry Group.

In 2003 she was the curator of the exhibition MAKING A SPLASH at the Arts Gallery of the London Wetland Centre. In 2005 she organized the exhibition CROSSCURRENTS at the Orleans House Gallery/London and designed the stands for the 50th Anniversary Exhibition of the Association of Guilds of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers at the ‘Knitting and Stitching Show’ in London, Harrogate and Dublin.

A generous grant given by the Theo Moorman Trust in 2006 enabled her to visit Japan and teach two workshops at the Kawashima Textile School and the Seian University. Following that she received an invitation from HISHIO, the Centre for Cultural Exchange in Katsuyama / Okayama Prefecture, Japan for a solo exhibition and an artist’s residency in 2008.

The Arts Council England offered a grant for the development of a new body of work which will be shown in an exhibition in Britain in 2009.

Hillu’s speciality is to combine metal with yarns to create small to medium sized wall-mounted or larger free standing objects. She is interested in exploring all options of combining metallic and textile materials, the contrast between the hard and the soft, the rigid and the pliable.