Astrid Furnival obituary | Textile art
My friend, Astrid Furnival, who has died aged 85 after a long illness, was a pioneering textile artist. She eschewed the distinctions between arts and crafts and used words to enhance her imagery.
Astrid worked mainly with wool that she spun herself and used dyes that she developed from plants in her garden in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, or in the surrounding fields. She was a hand-knitter who firmly rejected the use of machines, and she utilised the cerebral concerns of concrete and visual poetry – in which the shape or appearance of a poem is related to its message – to produce works that feature the spatial arrangements of words but are also practical objects, such as knitwear and quilts.
Born in Stendal, near Berlin, to Leonore (nee Weber), who was later a scientist at the Kiel Institut für Weltwirtschaft, and Erich Belling, Astrid was cared for by her grandmother, who, as the Red Army advanced at the end of the second world war, pushed Astrid in her pram several hundred kilometres to safety in northern Germany while avoiding strafing by aircraft.
Her early life in Kiel, and later Bonn, was not to Astrid’s liking and her sanctuary was listening to Radio Luxembourg. Escaping to London as an au pair in 1957, she met John Furnival, then a student at the Royal College of Art, the following year. He was a friend of David Hockney, Pauline Boty, RB Kitaj and Peter Blake. Some pop art influences found their way into Astrid’s work.
She and John married in 1960, and moved to a cottage near Nailsworth. They, with the typewriter artist Dom Sylvester Houédard (AKA dsh), and the kinetic poetry sculptor Kenelm Cox, nurtured GLOUP (GLOUcestershire grouP), and Nailsworth became an important centre for the world of concrete and visual poetry.
In 1975, Astrid and John founded Satie’s Faction, a collaborative organisation that fused concrete poetry, visual art, music and performance to celebrate the life and work of Erik Satie. Also in the 70s, Astrid organised a touring exhibition, Afts and Crats, that brought about a fusion of the traditions of the arts and crafts.
Among the inspirations for her work were Dante, Blake, Mallarmé, Niedecker, Marvell, Lear, Joyce, Beckett, Klee, Satie, Schumann and Roland Kirk. She collaborated with many artists, including John, Tom Phillips, Ronald King, Adrian Mitchell and Richard Loncraine. Astrid is well represented in archives of concrete and visual poetry.
John died in 2020. Astrid is survived by her children, Eve, Jack and Harry, her stepdaughter, Claudia, four grandchildren, Joe, Martha, Dora and Lucas, and a great-grandchild, Frankie.
