Gyselbrecht, on the other hand, has never doubted her loyalty to textile – but has innovated over the decades to the point where it is practically a new art form. She is the kind of artist who goes directly to the source for her materials and lives with them from ground to showroom. She was last week awarded the Henry Van de Velde Career Award, the highest honour for a designer in Belgium.

In the 1970s, on farms in rural East Flanders, Gyselbrecht helped to shear the sheep herself before hand-spinning the wool, which she then dyed with self-made colours from flowers and trees. She eventually followed textile courses in Ghent, pushing the more technical aspects of the form into creative artistic areas. “Actually, I’ve learned the most from self study,” she once told an interviewer. “I realised that the creative opportunities were never ending.”

She became a teacher of form and colour, and the awards began to pour in – both in art and design. These include the Henry Van de Velde Public Prize in 2000. Among a huge number of exhibitions, she brought a birch forest to life through the use of parchment-like paper in the Dhont-Dhaenens Museum in Deurle and draped a Ghent church alter with a bow, white fabric stations of the cross on either side.

Always married to the idea of organic forms and of recycling materials, Gyselbrecht did not work with synthetic fibres until 1989. When certain techniques were simply “not done”, such as combining metal and textile threads, she tried them anyway, pioneering new styles.

“Textile is so fascinating, especially because – contrary to before – there are now opportunities for research and creativity in manufacturing,” she said. “It all depends on your own involvement and commitment and that depends in turn on your passion.”