Janneke Raaphorst is an artist and designer from the Netherlands.
Her practice centers on textile as a material, symbolic, and embodied medium. Her approach unfolds along three interconnected lines: researching materials and the histories they carry, creating meaning through ritual and storytelling, and facilitating forms of embodied handcraft that engage the knowledge held in the body. Recognizing the transformative and enchanting qualities of textiles, she works under the title textile wizard. Starting from the premise that all matter carries energy and that a sorcerer works consciously with this energy. She approaches textiles across the full life cycle of cloth, from source to rag.
Through this perspective, Raaphorst explores processes of transformation, decay, and renewal, celebrating the patina of the material world. From her studio Stof Tot Stof, she organizes workshops such as ecofeminist banner making and textile reuse practices. Her video works often emerge from personal rituals and the healing potential of storytelling. Through the creation of power objects and the framing of textile fragments as artefacts, she investigates the emotional and symbolic charge embedded in cloth.
As a writer and performer, Raaphorst invites audiences into embodied experiences through guided journeys. She has led Repair Meditations for the online sewing circle organized by the Feminist Handcraft Party and Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women's History. Alongside her individual work, Raaphorst develops collaborative projects in which communities become a source of stories and shared knowledge. In the exhibition Archeologies in Marrakech she installed in 2026 an embodied crafts library in Marrakech called Takhamt, a Sea of Stories. This is library made of carpets is a safe space for the stories of handcrafting women who share their wisdom through textile books and carpets.