Thea Brandauer

REWOVEN – Athena’s Peplos

Thea Brandauer’s REWOVEN – Athena’s peplos hangs in the Museum für Kunst & Gewerbe (MK&G) in Hamburg, Germany. The museum commissioned the woven work for ‘Feste Feiern!’, an exhibition about the significance and meaning of celebrations through the ages. The design is a contemporary interpretation of the mythological motifs on a Greek vase from 350 BC. Brandauer filled in the missing parts of the story herself based on an extensive analysis of the ancient drawings, which she discovered were made according to a fixed system. She abstracted the figures and created her own visual system based on geometric cut-outs. Her desire to translate this into a woven fabric is no coincidence. The motifs are thought to have originated from a cloak (peplos) that was draped around the statue of Athena on the acropolis during the annual celebrations in ancient Athens. The tapestry, which measures 160 cm x 580 cm, was Brandauer’s graduation project at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.

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