About Claudia Hill

Claudia Hill is a Berlin-based artist whose interdisciplinary work is rooted in textile, weaving and performance. Hill came to textile art from an extensive career in fashion and costume design. From 1998 to 2011 she ran her own fashion label, presenting internationally in New York, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin and other cities. Her work in performance includes collaborations with choreographers and companies such as William Forsythe, The Wooster Group and Meg Stuart.

Hill uses weaving and textile as primal forms of creation to explore material, transformation and forms of connection. Her work ranges from woven paintings to large-scale sculptural tapestries and collaborative weaving projects.

Recent exhibitions include Kate Werble Gallery, New York (2024), Haus Kunst Mitte, Berlin (2023), Shedhalle, Zurich (2022), and a solo exhibition at Efremidis, Berlin (2021), marking the publication of her book Social Fabric Earth Return (Bom Dia Books). Hill has also presented work at mumok Vienna, Paris Internationale and HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin.

Her projects have been supported by the National Performance Network, Fonds Darstellende Künste and the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe, among others. In 2025, Hill conducted artistic research with the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco and Quechua communities in the Peruvian Andes. In the same year, she began teaching as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Fine Arts Münster.

Textile has been a continuous medium throughout my life. Before focusing on art, I worked in performance art and as a fashion and costume designer. For me, fabric was always closely connected to the body, facilitating both movement and transformation.

I experience weaving as a private performance, whether I work alone or with others. It is the repetitive, very physical act of weaving that joins the material, memory and experience into a single work.

My first woven work, the Travelling Poncho, travelled around the world for a decade. The premise of this art piece as part performance, part physical sculpture, was that it was to be worn by different artists in their varied locations. I liked replicating the simple form of the poncho, a rectangle with an opening, because this form is found across many cultures. The resulting videos and photographs turned into an artist’s book that I showed in an exhibition alongside the poncho itself. This project illustrated how a textile can carry traces of the people, places and experiences that it encounters; and further, how individual threads gain strength through their relationship with one another, allowing each to remain visible within the larger structure.

My recent collaborative weaving project began during the pandemic with a group of artists, and now I regularly open my studio to visitors in Berlin. I introduce them to the loom and offer technical guidance, while leaving space for their own decisions. One person may continue where another has stopped, enabling different gestures and energies to accumulate within the same work.

I work primarily on a late 19th-Century wooden tapestry loom, creating works that range from intimate handwoven pieces to three-dimensional tapestry landscapes. The works are tactile and layered, bringing together dense woven areas, loose threads, irregular structures and objects embedded within the surface. Hand-dyed fibres sit alongside collected and reused textiles, natural materials, and personal objects. Some works hang freely in space, showing both sides and inviting the viewer to move around them.

For me, the loom has become a tool, a meeting place and a sanctuary. It is a place to slow down, to work with my hands, and to enter into a different kind of attention. I envision with my work bringing the natural into the urban and the ancient into the present.