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For a long time, female artists were admitted to art schools specialising in the applied arts, particularly textiles. And ornamentation had a firm place within the textile arts. Sophie Taeuber-Arp taught the textile class at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts for many years. The works on display here illustrate how she created representational motifs from the material's structure itself.
Miriam Schapiro and Silke Radenhausen supported the terms ‘Textiles – Ornament – Art by Women’ positively. They sought to create a form of female art that could hold its own against that of their male colleagues, whilst breaking with convention in terms of material, technique and colour.  Miriam Schapiro’s unusual ‘Dormer’ (skylight) form is a response to the enormous formats of the monochromatic paintings of her time. Silke Radenhausen cut and sewed rather than painting on canvas. The result is a three-dimensional object inspired by Owen Jones’s ‘The Grammar of Ornaments’, the most famous book on ornamentation of the 19th century.
Through her works, Rosemarie Trockel questions gender roles, and she uses the ‘harmless’ textile arts as a medium for political messages – much like Yelena Popova, Rufina Bazlova and Anna Andreeva. Andreeva, a textile designer at the Red Rose Silk Factory in Moscow, bypassed the Soviet Union's ban on abstraction by giving her designs titles that alluded to progress: electricity, radio waves.