My Interest in Textile Construction and Materials has led me from one Theme to the Next
Throughout my working life I have followed my aspiration and my interest in textile construction and materials so that one theme has led to the next. The first 25 years I worked on traditional shaft loom and damask draw loom. The products were one-off textiles, wall hangings, semi-transparent weavings, partly unwoven textiles, textile reliefs and sculptural forms.
’Transitions’ has been a recurring theme, patterns that change or are dissolved, transitions from warpfaced to weft-faced weaves, conversions from the tightly woven to the semi-transparent, gradations from light to dark by mixing materials, or in colours dyed on the warp prior to weaving.
The first few years I focused on complex weave constructions and explored the possibilities inherent in damask weaving. That led to a series of white tapestries with different structures in many layers and to my first large commissioned textile artwork ‘Transition in Structure and Colour’ for Amtscentralen, Esbjerg. In 1984, on the basis of these tapestries, I started designing for Georg Jensen Damask.
My next focus point was the character of the materials. The suppleness of sisal was used in woven reliefs with straight surfaces as opposed to wavy shapes. The heaviness and gravity of the linen yarn was expressed in feather-light textile sculptures interwoven in narrow ribbons. Sculptural shapes of double-woven layers of fabric were stretched up in the series ‘Crystal Forms’.
Stiff horsehair interwoven with narrow ribbons became light, semi-transparent panels with gradations from black to white. Later the horsehair was dyed as well as the ribbons. The ribbons became wider and wider and I let go of the horsehair. I found a new focus point in colour-gradations dyed on the warp combined with brocaded patterns.
My encounter around 2000 with digital drawing programmes and digital thread control became a turning point. The digital tools opened up for other worlds of imagery, which I had previously been unable to weave. Digital subject processing made it possible for me to pursue my fascination with the phenomenon: interference. I was able to reconstruct elusive, optical three-dimensional phenomena in my computer. I manipulated these patterns into the shapes I wanted and used them as motifs in the project “Interferens”. A corresponding video animation was created in collaboration with video producer Bo Hovgaard and projected at the exhibition ‘Interferens’ in 2005.
I reworked one of the motives into the upholstery fabric ‘Interferens’ for Kvadrat 2007.
I found great inspiration in exploring the new possibilities that the access to digital tools offered. I developed an entirely new unsystematic weave structure based on pixels in eight colours RGB/CMYK+W. Each pixel in the motive was substituted with a thread of the same colour and I could weave completely even colour transitions. An important experiment was a double-woven colour spectrum from 2006 with complementary colours on the two sides. ‘Spekter’ is now at the Textile Museum in Borås.
In 2014 Wolf Gordon Inc. USA started production of ’Millions of Colors’ an upholstery fabric based on my unsystematic weave construction in basic colours. The fabric is produced to order in numerous colour combinations.
The project “Traces of Light” created in collaboration with Bo Hovgaard, took its point of departure in my fascination of unfocused light, as experienced in backdrop images in cinema. We recorded unfocused video of light in different cities. Individual images were turned into motives in three series of tapestries, ’City Light’, ’Rush Hour’ and ’Times Square’. The video recordings were edited into three corresponding video sequences which were projected next to the tapestries at the exhibition “Traces of Light” 2012.
During the last few years I have completed a number of commissioned site-specific textile artworks.
