Women’s Stories – with Shira Shoval
This month, we continue our tradition and introduce you to another beloved creator. Much like Roni Yeheskel from last month, Shira Shoval deconstructs and reassembles the world through the lens of textile. Her perspective brings us right back to the spark that ignited iota in the first place—that profound falling in love with the textile medium. Shira embodies a multidisciplinary, creative female practice, with an infectious passion (and, let's be honest, slightly enviable) for everything she touches.
Could you introduce yourself?
I am Shira Shoval—a designer, researcher, curator, lecturer, and an aspiring athlete in the making. A Jerusalemite at heart, I currently live with my family in the Yad Eliyahu neighborhood of Tel Aviv, which, as it turns out, is home to a fairly large community of former Jerusalemites.
Tell us about your work. What background do you come from?
I studied in the Department of Textile Design at Shenkar, where I also teach today, and later completed a Master’s degree in the Design Management and Innovation track in Industrial Design at Bezalel. Currently, I am finishing a preparatory research year in the Cultural Studies Program at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I plan to begin my doctoral studies in the coming year.
For me, academic research is another way to delve deeper into the themes that have preoccupied me for years as a practitioner—someone who exhibits work and creates through material, process, and technology.
I engage in creation, research, curation, and teaching. Across all these, I am driven by a central question: What is the value of material and technological knowledge today? I am a self-confessed factory geek. I am deeply fascinated by manufacturing processes—the skills and technologies required to make objects, and the knowledge embedded within the act of making itself. At the same time, I am intrigued by the human senses, particularly the sense of touch, and how we comprehend material, space, and technology through the body, rather than solely through sight or abstract thought.
Where do you draw inspiration from?
Yesterday, I watched the Spring–Summer 2027 runway show by Issey Miyake online, and I felt that elusive sensation called inspiration: a pure moment of wonder and awe. It was a complete sensory experience of movement, music, and breathtaking textiles, paired with technological innovations that evoke genuine emotion and curiosity. What is it made of? How is it produced? Why does the material behave this way? I love works that possess a hint of an enigma—something that makes you want to uncover the process behind them.
Even though I watched the show through a screen (attending the next one in person is definitely a dream of mine!), I could almost feel the textures, the weight of the fabric, and its touch against the skin. That, I think, is where inspiration resides for me: that precise moment when something manages to awaken both the imagination and the physical body.
How do you begin the creative process for a new project?
With associative writing and sketching. I always carry a notebook and a black 0.4 Pilot pen in my bag, and I write constantly: lists, words, sentences, thoughts, questions. I also do a lot of thinking while walking. I tend to be quite contemplative, and it takes time for me to articulate the core question I want to set out with.
Concurrently, almost every project I take part in starts with a material anchor—a specific material, a technique, or a production process through which I can begin asking questions. Writing helps me untangle what I am truly searching for. In my daily routine, I also take a lot of photographs; this visual documentation helps me crystalize ideas and concepts.
From the course "Materials Now: Nonwoven Design Technologies," Department of Textile Design, Shenkar
How does handcraft relate to all this?
For me, handcraft is first and foremost about the hand—and the body as a whole—as a repository of knowledge. The hand does not merely execute what the brain has already decided. It learns through trial, detects subtleties, responds to the medium, remembers motion, and often knows before we can even find the words to articulate what it knows.
Lately, I find myself returning to the writings of architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa, particularly his book The Eyes of the Skin, where he addresses the primacy of touch in how we perceive the world. This resonance runs deep for me: the understanding that we do not merely see and conceptualize our environment, but encounter it physically through our bodies. I am especially drawn to the knowledge forged through action—a knowledge that connects body, material, and technology. In that sense, manual craft is far more than a technique or skill; it is a way of knowing.
This inquiry carries into my teaching as well. In a course I teach at Shenkar, for instance, my students and I explore where manual intervention can integrate into industrial manufacturing—even disrupting it, slowing it down, or unlocking entirely new possibilities. The intersection between the human hand and the system, between a personal gesture and a rigid process, is an extraordinarily rich territory.
How have recent years and the local situation influenced your practice?
On a personal level, as a mother of three young children, life has felt like a continuous roller coaster since COVID, and my deepest hope is to raise them here in peace and tranquility.
Professionally, inside the micro-factories I research, war, uncertainty, and economic crisis translate immediately into tangible realities: orders vanish, raw materials fail to arrive, manufacturing shifts toward defense-related goods, and operations undergo fundamental shifts. All of this has sharpened my focus on local production and craft knowledge even further.
Reality has also entered my studio practice. Eretz (Land / Earth), an installation I am currently exhibiting at the Arts and Design Biennale at the Eretz Israel Museum alongside Ariel Blonder, emerged from our ongoing material research into "frustrated ceramics." Two materials with divergent shrinkage rates generate tension, distortion, and fractures during the firing process. It was crucial to us that the material and technology remain integral to the concept itself, allowing the internal tension within the matter to carry the weight and resonance of the word Eretz in these times.
"Eretz", 2025, Shira Shoval and Ariel Blonder
What are you currently working on?
We have just embarked on the third installment of the exhibition series Material Intelligence, which I co-curate with Yair Barak. Scheduled to open in May 2027 at the Makom L'Omanut Gallery in Kiryat HaMelacha, it is a collaboration between the gallery and the Kiryat HaMelacha Culture Cell. We are working with an exceptional group of eight diverse artists who will collaborate closely with local micro-factories over the coming months. It is a shared journey of research, learning, and discovery, where the artworks emerge directly from the dialogue between artists and craftspeople. I am eager to see what unfolds.
This year, I will also begin teaching a new course in the Master of Design program at the University of Haifa, which I am currently designing around questions of research, experimentation, and thinking through material.
What else do you dream of achieving?
Over the years spent researching Kiryat HaMelacha, I have witnessed more and more micro-factories and workshops shut their doors. This has fueled my desire to consider how my work can effect broader change at the urban level: How do we preserve production infrastructure within the city? How do we enable small-scale manufacturers to keep operating, and how can we forge fresh connections between them and designers, artists, students, and creative communities? I am interested in viewing local production as a vital component of the city's future, examining how research, curation, and field engagement can help cultivate conditions that sustain it.
I also dream of writing a book that gathers the body of knowledge accumulated over the years in Kiryat HaMelacha—the interviews with factory owners, the objects, the exhibitions, the personal stories, and the archival documentation—giving these materials an enduring form that outlasts the projects themselves.
"Tel Aviv Craft" project. Photo: Yonatan Bloom
From the working process, Material Intelligence – Action Research exhibition. Photography: Yair Meyuhas.
A recommendation for life / an exhibition / an album / a motto?
Ever since I directed the Materials Library at the Design Museum Holon, I’ve become something of a librarian at heart. I love spending time in libraries—the sensation of being surrounded by infinite knowledge that you can leaf through, touch, and feel physically. Especially when a library is housed in an inspiring building that offers an escape into a space distinct from everyday life.
I value the fact that libraries are accessible public spaces open to all, offering an encounter not just with knowledge, but with remarkable architecture—like the National Library in Jerusalem or the Bibliothèque Nationale in central Paris.
The National Libraries in Paris
The National Libraries in Jerusalem
Tell us something you learned from your grandmother—preferably something tangible.
My late grandmother, Yocheved, was a pioneer who settled in Kibbutz Ginosar and worked in the kibbutz sewing workshop. She made clothes for the children and would occasionally send care packages to us in the United States with garments she had sewn especially for us. To this day, I keep a pair of slippers she made for me over forty years ago, which have since been passed down to all three of my children.
When I was about ten years old, I spent a month by her side in the workshop. I remember her handing me fabric tubes and asking me to thread elastic bands through them. Having just arrived from the US, I looked at them in amazement and yelled, "Grandma, it's a scrunchie!"
I grew up in a very analytical household—my mother was a scientist and my father an economist—and it took me years to realize that my deep connection to textiles, art, and design likely began with her.
