mapping memories

felt, second-hand sweater
120 x 100 cm
2023

Do landscapes hold memories? If so, can textiles enable me to access and hold onto them? These were the questions that led me to Blönduós, a small village in northern Iceland, where I stayed for one month as an artist-in-residence. I was curious about the connections between the Icelandic landscape and the island’s rich textile tradition. I also had another, personal reason to travel there: not long before my best friend ended her life, she had come to Iceland to hike and experience the multifarious appearance of the landscape.

During the residency, I experimented with different techniques to try to ‘capture’ the landscape. I worked with locally sourced dyestuff and spent time weaving on the old looms in the attic, using patterns I found there. In the end I found that wool in its rawest form bears the strongest resemblance to the landscape, and I decided to make a larger piece of felted Icelandic wool, blended with fragments of the traditional lopapeysa, a knitted sweater.

Supported by Gerbrandy Cultuurfonds.
Read more (language: Dutch).

Photos of the felted piece laid out on the ground (top). Combined with photos taken in Blönduós during the residency (bottom).

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I am a textile artist, researcher, and writer based in Amsterdam. Through my work runs a tangible thread that is spun from questions about materials, hierarchies, traditions, patterns, shapes, and their relations. By means of artistic research, I aim to unravel them and investigate their potential to be interlaced in new ways.

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