Heidi Drahota

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Mixed media, Multi-fiber art
2023
Artist's country: Germany

Heidi Drahota studied to be a teacher at secondary school level I with a focus on art, history, mathematics and biology. After 27 years of teaching, she has been working exclusively as a freelance artist for 10 years.

She was engaged in photography, ceramics and watercolor painting. From 2002 her artistic focus totally changed on textile techniques and materials. She has developed many textile techniques such as felting or quilting autodidactically.

She has been exhibiting her textile works since 2009, in juried exhibitions since 2014 and since 2017 her works has been recognized worldwide.

She initiated and curated the international exhibition ‘Stuff for Thoughts’, which was organized together with the Nuremberg Human Rights Office on the occasion of the Human Rights Award 2015. For more than 3 years she organized and supervised the exhibition on her journey from Fürth via Prague to Birmingham.

Heidi Drahota was born in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany, in 1961 and lives with her husband in Nuremberg.

Stuff for thoughts

Sainte-Croix-aux-Mines

Different hearts beat in her chest. Heidi Drahota cannot be pinned down to one style. She often creates large format works on socially critical, political issues. There are also autobiographical references in her work. From this, whole rooms are often developing over the years on a single theme.

Felting is an integral part of her work. Yarns and threads can be found again and again as design elements in her felted works. Her trademark are also combinations of quilted and wet-felted sections. This creates three-dimensional effects. In her Photo-Felt Collages she plays with material, techniques and structures to match her own photographs.

She uses techniques of painting and graphics, but also of printing and ecoprinting. She mostly uses her longarm for drawing, painting and writing.

Daily newspapers can also be found in her work. She uses the paper itself and, on the other hand, gets inspiration from it in terms of content, telling her stories on fabric, touching people and giving Stuff for Thoughts.