Norma Starszakowna was born to Polish and Scottish parents in Crosshill in Fife, Scotland in 1945. She studied at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee from 1962–66. Starszakowna is known for her innovative explorations of textile processes, as well as her long teaching career between 1976 and 2008.
Textile artist, designer, and teacher Norma Starszakowna was born to Polish and Scottish parents in Crosshill in Fife, Scotland on 9 May 1945. Her father was Bernard Starszak, a Polish Holocaust survivor who managed to escape to Scotland during the Second World War, where he married her mother Elizabeth McParlane. Starszakowna’s father used to hold her up as a child to paste hand-drawn and printed political posters on lamp posts in late 1950s Fife, ‘seeding the idea of drawing as a social activity with purpose’ (Game, 2020). Historian Mary Schoeser described this as catalysing ‘the artist’s powerful connection to the socio-political potency of calligraphic symbols and graphic ephemera of all kinds’ (Schoeser, 2005). Her parents nevertheless saw art training as an unsuitable path, and Starszakowna lost touch with her father who subsequently left the family and returned to Poland. Aged 15, Starszakowna had to financially support herself through the last two years of secondary school in order to gain the qualifications required for art school. She then successfully studied art and design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (now DJCAD, University of Dundee) from 1962–66. She completed numerous life drawings there, as part of a traditional Scottish art school education, but became more interested in the new processes and materials that were being discovered at the time, particularly in textiles. Following her undergraduate degree, she gained a coveted place at the Royal College of Art in London to further her education. Failing to win a scholarship, however, she instead set up her own textile and interior design studio in Dundee in 1966 (Game, 2020). The same year she married Andrew Taylor, with whom she had two children, Nikolas and Jared.
Since her time at college in Dundee, Starszakowna had been living in a derelict house in Lochee, once the centre of Dundee’s jute industry. She remained there during her first two years as an independent designer, inspired by the debris of machine cogs and wall sketches from dismantled looms. At this time, she was primarily interested in Batik techniques, which involved decorating cloth using wax and dye. She exhibited these works in solo shows at the Compass Gallery in Glasgow, entitled Batiks: Norma Starszakowna (1971) and Norma Starszakowna: New Works in Batiks (1979). Teaching was also important to her and she lectured at Duncan of Jordanstone between 1976 and 1984, and in 1977 received a Scottish Arts Council Award for research into new printing and dyeing processes. She was appointed Head of Textiles and Fashion in Dundee between 1984 and 1995, and Deputy Head of Design between 1992 and 1998 (the college was incorporated into the University of Dundee in 1994). Keenly supportive of her students, in 1985 Starszakowna converted a derelict shop space in Dundee into a printed textile workshop and retail space to assist a cohort of promising postgraduate students with the development of their ideas and samples.
Despite her concurrent teaching responsibilities, between 1990 and 1992 Starszakowna was immersed in a major design commission for Winchester Cathedral with Issey Miyake and Ann Sutton. Some of this work used a crushed silk substrate and overprinted pigment to create a textile that reflected both Japanese traditions of shibori and a Western-aesthetic use of screen-print (Schoeser, 2007). Another solo show, Norma Starszakowna: Professional Exhibition, was held at DJCAD’s Cooper Gallery in 1997. In 2001 Starszakowna established the Textile Futures Research Unit, through which she began to explore the ‘interface of digital and screen-printing processes, incorporating digital imagery with heat-reactive media, pigment, glaze and patinations to further develop the tensions between actual and virtual reality’ (Wisniowski, 2017). In 2004 Starszakowna installed Hinterland, commissioned by the Scottish Parliament for its newly built and inaugurated building, in which eighteen digitally and screen-printed silk organza panels explore the landscape, industry, and human innovation of Scotland. The following year she created Diasporas for the COLLECT show at the V&A, using fragments of graffiti and messages to relate directly to the history and memories embedded in walls and buildings. Starszakowna was Director of Research at the London Institute (now University of the Arts) from 1999–2005 and completed her career in education as the Director of Research, Art, Architecture and Design at University of Lincoln from 2005–08. In 2009 she was contacted by her father’s second family in Poland for the first time while participating in the international exhibition at Art Quill, Australia entitled Artcloth: Engaging New Visions.
Norma Starszakowna lives in London. The curator of Fife Contemporary, Amanda Game, states that all facets of Starszakowna’s professional life ‘have helped to connect and forge new human communities in ways that have made an unparalleled contribution to culture in Scotland and beyond’ (Game, 2020). Her works are held in UK public collections including the V&A and the Scottish Parliament.