Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1940 Stendal, Germany

Year of Migration to the UK: 1957

Other name/s: Astrid Belling

Biography

Artist Astrid Furnival (née Belling) was born in Stendal, Germany in 1940. At the age of five, she left East Germany with her grandmother and eventually immigrated to London, England in 1957. In 1960, she married the London-born avant-garde artist John Furnival (1933-2020), and the couple moved to a village near Nailsworth in Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds, where they spent most of their lives and brought up four children. Apart form a year-long residency in New Mexico, USA, a brief period in France and regular trips to Italy, the couple remained close to home. Astrid and John Furnival were connected to various national and international art and literary movements, such as kinetic art, mail art, British Pop Art, book art, and the worldwide Concrete Poetry movement. They often worked with other artists and poets, especially Concrete poets, such as the Bahamas-born Scottish artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the British Benedictine priest of French heritage, Sylvester Houédard, with whom John Furnival founded Openings Press, dedicated to publishing concrete poetry and related works. The Furnivals also established Satie’s Faction, an organisation dedicated to honouring and promoting the legacy of the Franco-Scottish composer, Erik Satie, and were close friends with British painter, David Hockney.

Astrid Furnival is a self-taught mixed-media artist whose practice has centred primarily on textiles and fibres, particularly knitted wool and silk, her body of work encompassing flags, quilts, bedspreads, throws, sweaters, and dresses. The use of natural rather than synthetic dyes has been a key aspect of her practice, utilising plant dyes sourced from New Mexico, collected around Gloucestershire, or cultivated in her own garden. These natural colours have played an essential role in shaping the concept of each piece, influencing the viewer’s response as much as the patterns or forms themselves. Furnival's pieces are characterised by intricate patterns, a broad spectrum of colours, and a textured interplay of fibre densities. She deliberately blurs the boundaries between art and craft, identifying herself as an experimental artist rather than a craftsperson. Text often features prominently in her work, with puns, poetry, wordplay, and symbols that act as stand-ins for conventional language. Furnival manages to fuse the intellectual rigour of Concrete and Visual poetry with the aesthetics and principles of the Arts and Crafts movement. The result is a body of work that is both conceptually rich and, at times, practically functional, though her focus has been more on ideas than on utility. The textual elements she incorporates are wide-ranging, drawn from sources as diverse as William Blake, Edward Lear, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, alongside her own imagination and her husband’s writings.

Furnival has held several exhibitions in England, Belgium and the USA. In the 1970s, she reintroduced to the UK the rarely used and largely forgotten technique of natural dyeing, as she found the results to be superior to those produced by synthetic compounds. In 1976, the South West Arts Council awarded her a grant for a project involving natural dyes, which she used to purchase wool and materials for an exhibition in Belgium, as well as to continue her practice from her home at Rooksmoor House, Woodchester, Gloucestershire. Another South West Arts Council-funded project, the exhibition, Afts and Crarts, which she curated in the 1980s, continued its tour into the early 1990s, with the aim of bridging the gap between what is traditionally considered high art and low art / craft. In 1984, the couple were Artists in Residence at the Roswell Museum and Art Centre in New Mexico, USA, which was accompanied by an exhibition of their work. In 1986, they held a month-long exhibition at the Prema Arts Centre in the Gloucestershire village of Uley, where different members of the family displayed their work. Titled the Joe Show, it was named after the newest arrival, one-year-old Joe, whose photographs and crayon pieces formed the centrepiece of the exhibition. In this ‘arts bonanza’, as the Bristol Evening Post described it, Furnival, Joe’s grandmother, was presented as a specialist in textiles and natural plant dyes. ‘It was an amazing effort to bully the whole family into getting the exhibition ready on time,’ she remarked (Guy, 1986, p. 13). More recently, in 2018, the Arts Council of England awarded Furnival and her husband a grant for a travelling exhibition across England and Europe.

Astrid Furnival lives and works in the Cotswolds, England. In the UK public domain her work is held in the collection of Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery. Her piece, Roses Arose (1983), which was commissioned by David Brown for the Contemporary Art Society in 1982, plays with both the words themselves and Gertrude Stein’s iconic phrase, ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ (which has echoes as ‘Eros is eros’).

Related books

John Furnival and Astrid Furnival, Lost for Words (Gloucestershire: Openings-Closings Press, 2018)
B. J. Moxham, Flags by Astrid Furnival for Dorothy (Nailsworth: Openings-Closings Press, 2014)
B. J. Moxham, Ariadne's Thread the Fabric Artworks of Astrid Furnival (Nailsworth: Openings-Closings Press, 2014)
Francis Woolley, ‘The Concrete Poetry Movement in Britain and Avant-gardism’ (PhD. Diss: University of Southampton, 2008)
Ann McGarrell and Sally Anderson, The Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program: An Anecdotal History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007)
Allan Guy, ‘Little Joe stars in arts bonanza’, Bristol Evening Post, 10 October 1986, p. 13
No author, ‘Ancient art gets a grant’, Bristol Evening Post, 7 December 1976, p. 5

Related organisations

Satie’s Faction (co-founder )

Selected exhibitions

Modern and Contemporary Art from the Collection of Chippenham Museum (group show), Chippenham Museum, Chippenham, Wiltshire (2024)
John & Astrid Furnival in Venice, England & Co., London (2019)
Lost for Words (dual exhibition by Astrid and John Furnival), Museum in the Park, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire (2019)
A Cotswold Celebration (dual exhibition by Astrid and John Furnival), Ruskin Mill Gallery, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire (2018)
A Cotswold Celebration (dual exhibition by Astrid and John Furnival), Ruskin Mill Gallery, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire (2018)
Astrid and John Furnival: 1984 in America (dual exhibition), Roswell Museum and Art Centre, Roswell, New Mexico, USA (1984)
Joe Show (family group show), Prema Arts Centre, Uley, Gloucestershire (1986)
Afts and Crarts (curated), South West Arts Council Touring Exhibition (1978, 1981, 1983, 1990s)
Astrid Furnival (solo exhibition), Galerie Premier Etage, Liege, Belgium (1977)
Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (1972)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Astrid Furnival]

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Astrid Furnival artist