Annegret soltau interviewing

Binding, Stitching, and the Haptic Thread

“It is precisely in the breached boundaries of the skin in such imagery that memory continues to be felt as a wound rather than seen as contained other”

Through her preoccupation with the body and threads, Annegret Soltau’s (b.1946), childhood influences infiltrate her work.

Annegret soltau interviewing

Her techniques of wrapping and stitching the body, however, are not concerned with the finesse of delicate needlework historically associated with femininity. Rather, they challenge representational and cultural expectations of norms of traditional ‘needlework’.

Soltau’s collaborator and friend Karin Struck suggested her use of needle and thread was more evocative of surgical stitching than feminine embroidery. And, more recently, Jutta von Zitzewitz described Soltau’s stitching as a red thread of resistance and prejudice, no doubt in response to her early life and relationships.

Brought up by her grandmother on a farm in a small community near