Background
Von Randow was born in Giessen, Germany in 1901.
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Ilse Randow
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Her family was actively involved in artistic and scientific culture, and in 1917 von Randow enrolled at the Berbenich art school in Darmstadt, where she studied until 1919 when changes in her family finances meant she left university and returned home, taking up a job as a medical illustrator at Giessen university.
Career
In 1927 von Randow moved to China, to become a laboratory technician at T’ung-Chi university, a German-language institute near Shanghai. with whom she had two sons. They arrived in Auckland in April 1952. In Auckland von Randow quickly established herself as a leading figure in modernist craft, exhibiting widely and establishing a studio at the Auckland City Art Gallery where she taught younger weavers including Zena Abbott and Ida Lough.
In the mid 1960s von Randow became disillusioned with what she saw as an anti-modernist attitude amongst craft practitioners in New Zealand.
In 1966 she left for England, settling in West Mersea, where she retired from weaving and took up first batik and later painting. In 1992 von Randow returned to New Zealand.
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, to which she donated her workbooks and collection of weaving samples documenting her entire career.
Von Randow died in Auckland on 18 October 1998.
Von Randow"s major public work was a set of curtains commissioned for the Auckland City Art Gallery in December 1957. Completed in 1958, the curtains were the largest piece of handweaving created in New Zealand at that date. The curtains are now held in the collection of the Auckland Museum.
In 2013 von Randow"s curatins were the subject of a project at the Auckland Art Gallery by contemporary New Zealand artist Ruth Buchanan.
Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins, The textiles of Ilse von Randow, Auckland: Auckland Museum, 1998. Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins, "Weaving Light: Ilse von Randow and Colin McCahon", Art New Zealand, no 94, Autumn 2000.
