Ismini Samanidou

Artist, Designer and Educator, Greece/UK

Ismini Samanidou is an artist, designer and educator from Greece currently based in the United Kingdom. Her detailed textile works push the limits of craft, art, and design by weaving together different materials and textures from around the world. She was born in Athens and trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. Her work is based on a labor-intensive, handmade style that combines traditional weaving methods with drawing, film and installation. Photography has a big impact on her work, which includes translating worn, weathered surfaces from places like Antigua, Guatemala into tactile, textile composites. Her site-specific installations, like the famous The Revenge of Arachne (2003), bring to mind both mythological stories and modern conversations about space. Ismini's professional practice includes exhibitions, commissions, residencies, teaching, and interdisciplinary projects with architects, filmmakers, and sound artists. She received the Jerwood Contemporary Makers award and balances a devotion to the handmade with innovation, having expanded her work through digital Jacquard weaving during an Artist-in-Residence post at University College Falmouth. Her textiles are housed in prestigious collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, showing a continuous investigation of materiality, memory, and the traces of human touch within technologically sophisticated processes.

Ismini Samanidou, “It is in the Spaces Between Things that Things Happen” 

Textiles are among the oldest and most enduring forms of human expression, intimately tied to the cultural, creative, and social fabric of communities across time and space. From indigenous weaving traditions and ancestral dyeing techniques to contemporary fiber art and speculative textile design, threads carry knowledge, memory, and identity. They encode stories of migration, resistance, ritual, gendered labor, and aesthetic evolution. 

As a weaver, artist, designer and educator living and working between two European countries, I find myself navigating what at times seem two separate worlds when seen from the textile perspective. Their very different histories have resulted in markedly different conditions of, and attitudes towards, education, making and value around textiles. I can find myself lost between these two worlds, feeling like I am speaking a third language that is not completely understood in either place. But maybe with this doubt and uncertainty come opportunities and possibilities to attempt to reimagine ways of learning, making and communicating.