Elke Weisbarth operates at the intersection of art and design. With many years of experience in material design, she now works in her studios “elle Tufterei” in Munich and Stuttgart.
She translates emotions and impressions into textile forms, making them tangibly experiential. Her works invite sensory encounters: they touch deeply and yearn to be touched. Behind this lies the question: How can art make our relationship with nature tangible and emotionally accessible?
In her view, plant beings and natural fibers are not merely materials and sources of inspiration, but carriers of life and symbols of interconnectedness. For Weisbarth, textile art offers the possibility to reflect on this relationship—the invisible threads that weave everything together.
As the philosopher Emanuele Coccia writes in The Roots of the World, the plant represents the closest, most elemental connection that life can forge with the world. Her work is a pursuit of transformation—turning material into visible connection, and using color, texture, and form to create sensory spaces that invite altered perception.
Through refining processes such as felting, tufting, layering, and binding, her works emerge where organic shapes, movement, and materiality intertwine.
The surface becomes a place of condensation: fibers merge, dissolve, overlap, and transform. Thus, a picture emerges that describes not a static state, but the perpetual process of becoming.
@elke_weisbarth
elkebarth@icloud.com / info@elkeweisbarth.com
