Ilse Amalie Mathilde von Randow

Ilse Amalie Mathilde von Randow (née Henneberg, 12 June 1901 – 18 October 1998) was a New Zealand weaver.

Life and career Ilse von Randow was born in 1901 in Giessen, Germany. She was the daughter of Bruno Paul Eduard Henneberg, university professor, and Helene Mathilde Fritze. Her family was actively involved in artistic and scientific culture. In 1917 von Randow enrolled at the Berbenich art school in Darmstadt, where she studied until 1919 when changes in her family finances led her to quit her studies and returned home, taking up a job as a medical illustrator at Giessen University. While working out of this studio, von Randow exhibited widely and established herself as a leading figure in modernist craft. In 1954, she became vice-president of the Weavers Guild. She died in Auckland on 18 October 1998,

Work Von Randow had a good relationship with the Auckland Art Gallery, weaving curtains and upholstery fabric for the gallery and teaching summer schools. Completed in 1958, the curtains were the largest piece of handweaving created in New Zealand at that date.

By the mid-1960s, the weaving community because increasingly interested in creating a 'New Zealand style' and von Randow, feeling she had contributed all she could to the movement, moved to London without her loom.

A retrospective of her work was held at the Auckland War Memorial Museum in 1998. She donated her workbooks and weaving samples from the length of her career to the museum.

Awards

1953: Esmonde Kohn Prize for excellence in the applied arts by the Auckland Society of Arts