Step inside Magdalena Abakanowicz's forest of woven sculptures | Tate

Art is a state of being. You are born with the capacity to integrate your energy into objects, to create objects that never existed before. They can enlarge the knowledge of man about his planet, about his environment, about his problems. Magdalena Abakanowicz is one of the most well-known Polish artists of the 20th century. From the mid-1960s or late-1960s, she started to make what we now refer to as Abakans, as being these really large, big-scale pieces that could almost enfold you, that you could walk inside, that are like cocoons or coats or tents or a kind of habitat that you could curl up inside. The critics at the time didn't really know what to make of this new form of weaving, of tapestry making. They didn't know what they were looking at. Was this sculpture? Was this painting? Was this weaving? Was it tapestry? And so they coined the term Abakans to talk about her work, because it seemed to kind of defy all other categorisation. I think she's one of the only artists that I can think of that had a term coined after her name. Her subject matter is really about humanity, about war, about our existence as individuals. My words are in the objects I am making. This is my speech, this is my language, and it's the only language with which I can express myself freely. She grew up in an aristocratic family, and they spent a lot of time in a large manor house in the countryside in Poland. Her father was descended, according to the artist, from Genghis Khan, so Aba Khan, meaning son of Khan. When the artist was nine years old, the Second World War broke out, the Germans invaded Poland, and Abakanowicz was very traumatised, but she never spoke of herself as being a victim. Instead, she spoke about how these circumstances formed something of her spirit, her energy and her imagination, and drove her to make work, which is in many ways very heroic. She originally trained in painting, with weaving as an option, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She found quite quickly, after graduating, that she wanted to use textile as a way to express ideas and concepts and energy and emotion, not really just as something to be used or something functional within the home. So for her, fibre and textiles became a sculptural medium, and she was really drawn to using things like horsehair, as well as animal fibres like wool and cotton and other plant fibres. She said, we are all fibrous structures. She was very interested in the relationship between fibre and the body, and fibre and the world that we live in. Weaving, of course, is something that is structured. With the grid, the warp threads on the loom, you weave across weft threads, and of course weavers therefore stick to this rectangular format. Abakanowicz started to explore ways of making works which would have a rounded shape, and then taking those works off the wall. She made it herself, she made it with her own hands. It wasn't following a particular design, it was loose, it was improvisatory, and this was something that was very important to her. She realised that she could set up these sculptures in the gallery, in space, in relation to each other, to create what she called a situation or environment. A lot of the experience of encountering these works has to do with the way that they make you feel. There's something about their material softness, their energy as matter and material that relates to the body in a certain way. They have a really strong smell. Clearly she was drawn to a quite dark palette of colours. From certain sides they look like they're just dense, matte black, they suck in the light. But then you see on closer inspection where they pick up the light, you can see that there are shades of aubergines and different browns and reds that come through in the fibres. She would also use pieces of trailing rope, almost like sinews of a living structure. I learn a lot from people who visit my exhibition about my work. It's my expression but I couldn't put it into words, that's why I do it. They put it into words, so I learn from them. When I look at the Abercans, often to me they feel very much like a kind of living being with their own life. They might catch the breeze and turn or they really feel like these kinds of hairy beasts. She talked about how they had a feeling for her of safety, that she was recreating this feeling that she had as a young child in the Polish forests, nestling inside a hollow tree trunk. And then the red Abercan, it's become quite an iconic work, this big red almost vaginal shape confronting you like a big statement. Abakanowicz spoke about how she didn't mind that people would read these bodily associations into the works. In 1969 Abakanowicz collaborated with an experimental filmmaker and musician and she took her works out actually into the landscape. The artist has the works somehow magically installed out in this landscape. It almost looks like it could be a desert or it could be the surface of the moon. They look like kind of magically floating against this beautiful white sand. It's quite mesmerising. Always her ambitions were to make work which was environmental, which spoke about man's relationship to the land, to the environment, to history, to memory, all of these things. The works are quite heroic in many ways. This is certainly not domestic textiles. She wanted you to feel them in a bodily sense. She wanted to create a kind of encounter with these things.