Cut from a finer cloth

The best couturier in the world would be nothing without access to the most dazzling fabrics, but who among us knows the name of Saint Laurent's favourite mill, the identity of Armani's weavers, the pleaters of Miyake's magical silks, or Versace's bold screen printers?

Starszakowna's work, however, often stands on its own, either as wall hangings and awnings for sophisticated corporate headquarters, or cathedrals, or, perhaps, as one-off rugs ordered through the Edinburgh Tapestry Company.

This apart, she has a reputation as a brilliant and generous teacher; quite simply, one whose contagious love of her subject is matched by a determination to open fortune's doors to others.

Today she holds a personal professorship at Dundee's Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, a recognition of her years as course director of the printed textiles department, which not only has the highest record in Scotland for first class honours among design students and for gaining post-graduate places at London's Royal College of Art, but which, through Starszakowna's entrepreneurial zeal, has alerted the British and overseas textile industries to Dundee's special, creative verve.

And, at this point, it seems worth mentioning that while Glasgow remains plagued by uncertainty about the fate of its promised National Gallery of Scottish Art and Design, the building of Dundee's new #9m arts centre is under way, financed mainly by EU funding and the National Lottery's largest allocation of money for the arts in Scotland. Starszakowna is on the working committee for the complex which will combine exhibition and theatre space with restaurants, a print workship, and visual arts research studios. Its opening is expected early next year.

In the popular mind, of course, it is Glasgow's School of Art which captures most attention, but Starszakowna, unburdened by the glory of Mackintosh, has unfussily established herself as a charismatic and demanding leader, teeming with insights but never allowing her own work, or that of students, to slip into any of the slapdash arrogance which masquerades as freedom.

Such discipline may be rooted in the fact that there was never a conscious moment in her childhood when she didn't believe she would be an artist, but that very knowledge caused suffering, intensifying the turbulence of an already difficult family life.

So, the sunny distinction of her work has been reached by an aching route. By the time she was in her mid-teens her Polish father had returned to his native land from Fife, nostalgically seeking connections severed by the War. She has never seen him since because once he was in Poland the communists refused him permission to leave, and as the years passed, contact with his Scottish wife, Starszakowna's mother, and their three children just sort of evaporated.

''Today I have no idea whether he is still alive,'' she says. ''He'd been in the Polish air force and had arrived here with the Polish free forces. But all the time he was in Scotland, Poland, for him, remained the land of milk and honey and he always spoke of going back. Then when he did, he discovered it wasn't the same country but somewhere that held on to people against their will.''

Starszakowna's elder sister had accompanied their father, hating the visit from the moment they arrived. ''Both of them wanted to return almost immediately, and the only way she was able to do so was by staying in the consulate in Warsaw for six months while the British authorities fought for her departure papers''.

At home, the family was inevitably besieged by stress but the atmosphere was made more difficult because Starszakowna's relationship with her mother was always embattled. ''There were constant rows about my decision to stay on at school and take my highers, yet without those qualifications I knew I wouldn't get into art college.''

The price she paid for her stubborness was that in that final school year Starszakowna not only had to be self-supporting, but, when at home, she remained in a box room, six feet by seven feet, never watching television or sitting by the fire, or joining in family meals, her light switched off by 10pm . . . ''It was punishment. I had to wash my own clothes, and buy and cook my own food, so I worked in a Glenrothes cafe four nights a week and at weekends.''

Even the kitchen store cupboard was padlocked against her, but, on the quiet, Starszakowna would raid it with the aid of a screwdriver, then put the lock together again, carefully rubbing in some black boot polish to make the fitment appear untouched.

''It was survival by ingenuity and it took a month before the padlock fell off completely because, with all the meddling, the wood had worn away underneath. Then all hell broke loose, but that was nothing. The house was always filled with rows.''

Many of her early designs reflect bleak dislocation, the collages sometimes also a metaphor for the death camp stories related by her father, that sobbing wave of history strewn with violent exile and bereavement. ''As children we had heard the grown-ups talking about these terrible events while we were secreted behind chairs and under tables.

''My father was based in a camp at Haddington and along with others, he was put to work down the mines, a strange reversal for him because he was from a farming community with no experience of the coal industry.''

His mother was Jewish, but because of his blondness the German authorities had presumed Starszakowna's father to be of Aryan stock.

''They were going through the villages, taking anyone who looked very fair, but he managed to escape, and I don't think they ever found out about his Jewish links, although in a small community it would have been difficult to keep things quiet.

''But he managed to join the Red Army and was with them for quite a while.'' In fact, her father was in a Siberian-based unit on the eve of the Stalin/ Hitler pact, and only avoided being hauled off to the death and labour camps because, in one of those small, hidden acts of humanity where the stealth of courage outwits monstrous intent, the Russian military urged the Polish contingent to make a run for it.

''They equipped the Poles with rations and ammunition and sent them off into the night's vastness.

''Eventually they met up with the allied forces in the Middle East and while some were sent to Italy, my father's part of the air force was despatched to the UK for pilot training, but that never really materialised.''

Starszakowna believes that some years after the War what we now call post-traumatic stress began to manifest itself among certain survivors, her father included. ''There was no therapy counselling then, and I remember, from the age of four, a lot of aggressive anger in the family.

''My mother had also been orphaned at a young age, so neither parent had experience of bringing up children in a degree of stability, and they just fed off each other's inadequacies. They were both very political - my mother was a member of the communist party - and perhaps they were politically active because it was easier for them to love others in general terms than in a specific case; the private pain was just too much.''

Today she reflects on those troubled years as ones which have made her both vulnerable and strong. ''Probably I feel

rejection and criticism more personally and deeply than

I should.''

As for strengths, she points to a banner hanging in her recent exhibition at D of J and says: ''That one is called Dream of the Wounded Hero, and I think that if you are dealing with people, it's helpful to have experienced some hardship and sadness so that you can detect and understand it in others, even before anything is voiced.''

It was at D of J, that she met Andy Taylor, a fellow student and her partner for 34 years. He is now the course director of the department she established, and the couple's two sons, Jared and Nik, are also designers, both graduates of Dundee and the RCA.

Nothing, of course, could possibly have lived up to the expectations Starszakowna pinned on going to art college from an unhappy home, and inevitably there was disappointment. ''As in many art institutions in the sixties, there were tutors who didn't much care about their students, but that lack of creative and intellectual rigour made me focus on how art and design should be taught.

''After all, teaching is one of the few times where you can actually feel very close to individuals. There's this charge of energy and joy when you see on students' faces the sudden awareness of something they didn't know before.

''It may seem strange to say it, but it's similar to the sense you get when feeding an infant, something almost holy.'' Such eloquent commitment has obviously contributed to the excellence rating D of J holds for its art and design education, an honour it shares with six other UK establishments, all south of the Border.

It's hardly surprising then that Starszakowna was recently offered a highly tempting Head of Design post at a new institute planned for London's Docklands.

Hardly surprising, either that, after much reflection, she turned it down, not just because it would inevitably mean treading familiar ground, but because so many Dundee colleagues urged her to stay.

Without forsaking teaching altogether, she also wants to take her own work further, and you have only to glimpse the most recent hangings,

billowing with those sun-danced colours and painterly finesse, to recognise the nudge they give to others.

Norma Straszakowna, with or without her gilded eyelids, jolts the soul into imagination, setting it rolling, never more to stop.