Jana Visser (b. 1997) is a South African textile artist and handweaver based in the Netherlands. She holds a Bachelor in Fine Art from Stellenbosch University (2019) and both a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Textile Design from LUCA School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium, graduating Magna Cum Laude in 2022. Her Master's thesis, "an emptiness that breathes," was nominated for both a Thesis Prize and a Dirk Lauwaert Award.
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Visser's work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and form part of private collections in countries such as South Africa, France, Germany and Belgium. Notable recognitions include her piece "in the almost" being shortlisted for the LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize (2023), and her selection as a finalist for the ANNA Award (2024). She held her first solo exhibition, Breathing Matter, at Queens Brussels Gallery in 2024, and was included in Wanted Magazine's Young and Vital Artists list. Her work "still" was featured in the BIEN Kranj International Textile Biennial in Slovenia (2025). Recent exhibitions include: Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, TextilFest in Barcelona, and Interwoven Horizons in Beijing.
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Visser's weaving practice explores dualities – presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, control and surrender – not as oppositions but as reciprocal states of becoming. Grounding her work in openness to uncertainty, she navigates the delicate relationships between matter, time, and space through slow, deliberate methods that require patience to grasp their material and symbolic potency.
In her work, weaving becomes both process and image, where structural elements remain visible and surface becomes inseparable from content. She uses thread as a conduit to dimensions beyond the tangible, viewing her practice as a vital method of knowing – a rhythmic, embodied exploration of sensory perception, gesture, and self. Far more than a means to create textile, weaving is for Visser a vital method of internalising, of gaining knowledge and fundamentally a way to exist - or rather; to become.
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"Relying on a desire for subtlety, sensitivity, effort and intricacy; my intention is to create spaces of intimate observation and reflection in which layered meanings reveal themselves."
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