HIROKO TAKEDA (b. 1966, Japan)
Hiroko Takeda is a New York based artist born in Japan. She trained in the tradition of the Mingei Undou (Japanese Arts and Crafts Movement) and earned an MA in Constructed Textiles from the Royal College of Art in London. Takeda has exhibited in the US, Europe, Australia and Japan. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, by Surface Magazine and in the publication “Weaving: Contemporary Makers on the Loom” published by Ludion in 2018. For eight years, she was the senior designer at Jack Lenor Larsen Studio (Larsen was a long time associate of Anni Albers) prior to venturing out on her own. Takeda’s clients include Richard Meier, Victoria Hagan, Calvin Klein and Peter Marino, for whom she has created pieces for Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior. In 2019, she completed a residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut.
Originally trained to prioritize utility and craft, Takeda's interests in weaving evolved to view the medium as a means for self expression focused on her conceptualization of the world. "The world I see—like the world of warp and weft—has rules and constraints that are supposed to be good for us, but disorder happens naturally and the other side of tension is fluidity.” Takeda seeks to explore, manipulate and push the limits of her materials to realize her vision, which must be laid out with mathematical precision before she begins working on her handloom, while simultaneously welcoming that which is unforeseen. Her goal being to produce a work that is greater than what she could have initially imagined and in which a correspondence is achieved between light and dark, surface and depth, bound and unbound.
