Chronology

A working life

From batik murals in South Africa to textile sculpture and, today, ecological art in Portugal.

Celia de Villiers with the sculptor Kurt Lossgott, Lolli Looser and her mother in front of one of Celia's large textile collages, 1980s
Celia de Villiers with the sculptor Kurt Lossgott — her husband of 26 years — with Lolli Looser and her mother, in front of one of Celia’s large textile collages, mid-1980s — the textile-collage period that preceded the fibre sculpture.
1967Higher Education Diploma — Johannesburg College of Education / Wits.
1970sWorks as a batik artist; mural commissions for Kruger National Park, Holiday Inns, Mt Sheba Hotel and Ames Pharmaceuticals.
1980Textile Collages, Landesbank Galerie, Munich.
1981Textile Collages & Batiks, Raiffeisen Bank Galerie, Germany.
1991Selected among the 70 Best Art Quilts in the World, Paducah, USA.
1998BA Fine Arts (distinction), UNISA.
2002Scarlet Woman — later acquired by the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
2003Fragile, MACS Gallery; credited by the World Council for Art & Culture, San Francisco.
2004–05Sacatar Foundation Fellowship — Instituto Sacatar, Itaparica, Bahia, Brazil; founds an economic-empowerment project for women on the island. Saudade Bahia is made here.
2006LiveWire, Fried Contemporary, Pretoria.
2008MA Visual Arts cum laude, UNISA.
2011TRANSCODE: dialogues around intermedia practice (with Gwenneth Miller), UNISA Art Gallery.
2015Co-directs Ponte d’Arte residency, Portugal; begins sustained youth-development work.
2016–18In Public in Particular (Creative Europe) — Dublin, Turku, Zagreb.
2023–Forgotten Lands (Erasmus+) — art, youth and ecology.
NowEcological work — hydropolitics, wildfires and mycology — from Portugal.
 
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