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    Signe Emdal’s Chromatic Weavings Manifest Wonder and Joy

    Detail of “Fantasia” (2023). All artwork photos by Kristine Funch, courtesy of the artist, shared with permission

    Signe Emdal’s Chromatic Weavings Manifest Wonder and Joy

    February 10, 2025

    ArtCraft

    Kate Mothes

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    Twenty years ago, Signe Emdal founded a business that focused on making unique textile objects and garments, drawing on her background in jacquard weaving, fabric printing, and a range of other techniques. By 2021, though, she was feeling hemmed in and longed for a way to express herself through a more intuitive, less functional creative direction.

    “It was time to free myself from a frame I no longer fit and make a new one,” she tells Colossal. “I had no idea what the new frame would look like, but I trusted that life would bring me something better if I said goodbye to a setup that didn’t bring me joy anymore.”

    “Maison” (2023)

    A self-described “textile composer,” Emdal views the loom as a window where warp and weft interact to create storage vessels for memories. She is also deeply influenced by exploring new locations. “Art allows me to travel in a completely new way because I get to be in a creation process while spending time with or (being) in other cultures,” she says. Many works she makes on-site, influenced by her surroundings.

    Process is central to Emdal’s artistic education and continues to be the primary influence in her practice. “Everything is process, and everything is changing all the time,” she says. “Nothing is ever going to be finished!” She shares that through textiles, she learned to hone her concentration on both physical and metaphysical levels, finding that the meditative methodology of weaving echoes how she views art-making and life more broadly.

    Emdal’s related series Touch and Loop comprise sculptural, loom-woven wool in vibrant colors. From radiating puffs of vibrating color to elegant, draping details, her pieces are inspired by science fiction, feminism, art history, and music. “The sculptures are layers of delicate memories,” she says, embodying fragility, resilience, sophistication, and joy.

    Emdal’s work will be included in the Textile Art Biennial Slovenia, which runs from May 31 to August 14 across five cities. Find more on Emdal’s website and Instagram.

    “Dreams of Gaia” (2024)

    Detail of “Dreams of Gaia”

    “Heart of Nebula” (2024)

    “Fantasia” (2023)

    “Acqua 4 ever/Evigheden” (2024)

    “Spirit of Green” (2024)

    Detail of “Spirit of Green”

    “Murex 4ever” (2023)

    “Silky Way” (2023)

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    Marilou Schultz Weaves Computer Processor Patterns in Traditional Navajo Tapestries

    “Replica of a Chip” (1994), wool mounted on wood, 120 × 146.1 centimeters. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA. Image courtesy of American Indian Science and Engineering Society, shared with permission

    Marilou Schultz Weaves Computer Processor Patterns in Traditional Navajo Tapestries

    November 14, 2024

    ArtCraftDesignHistory

    Kate Mothes

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    What does Intel’s Pentium computer chip have in common with Navajo textiles? More than you might think.

    For artist Marilou Schultz, the ancestral practice of weaving melds with an unexpected contemporary source of inspiration. Merging analog loom methods with the patterns found on computer processor cores, Schultz entwines the histories of the Navajo people and modern technology.

    Detail of Intel Pentium core processor die

    In the late 17th century, Spanish colonists introduced a breed of sheep called the Iberian Churro to the American Southwest. The Diné—known also as Navajo—who had lived in the Four Corners region for hundreds of years, embraced shepherding and wool production, eventually developing a unique breed still managed today, the Navajo-Churro.

    Along with an aptitude for raising sheep, Diné weaving traditions flourished. Anthropologists surmise that the craft was adopted from the neighboring Puebloans sometime in the 12th or 13th centuries. As time passed, Navajo styles and techniques evolved, rising to popularity first among Plains Indian tribes and then, in the 19th century, with Europeans and non-Native tourists who sought out blankets and rugs for their remarkable craftsmanship and geometric patterns.

    Schultz, a mathematician and teacher in addition to her studio practice, was commissioned by Intel in 1994 to make “Replica of a Chip” as a gift to the American Indian Science & Engineering Society, an organization still active today that focuses on advancing Indigenous people in STEM. As computer historian Ken Schirriff details in a thorough blog post about the piece—especially its highly accurate layout—the work highlights the alluring patterns of a trailblazing piece of technology.

    Detail of “Replica of a Chip”

    The first Pentium processor was released in 1993. About the size of a fingernail, the die—the material on which the processor is fabricated—contains more than three million transistors. These microscopic switches control the flow of electricity to process data. Today, some high-powered chips contain billions of transistors.

    Schultz faithfully transferred the die pattern to a tapestry, employing delicate loom techniques and working from a photograph of the chip. Unlike traditional Navajo textiles, the geometries in “Replica of a Chip” are far from symmetrical.

    She used yarn pigmented with plant dyes, and the cream-colored regions are the natural shade of Navajo-Churro wool. Schultz told Schirriff that the weaving process was slow and deliberate as she referenced the image, completing about one to one-and-a-half inches per day. The painstaking and methodical process of sending warp through weft creates a beautiful tension between the instantaneous results we associate with digital tools today.

    Intel Pentium processors

    “Replica of a Chip” was the first in a series of weavings Schultz created based on computer circuits, including one known as the Fairchild 9040. While not as common as the Pentium, the Fairchild company is notable for its employment of Navajo workers in its operation in Shiprock, New Mexico—within the Navajo Nation—in the 1960s and 1970s.

    Part of a government initiative to try to improve the economic conditions of life on the reservation, Fairchild was incentivized to open a manufacturing center in Shiprock. “The project started in 1965 with 50 Navajo workers in the Shiprock Community Center manufacturing transistors, rapidly increasing to 366 Navajo workers,” Schirriff says. Eventually, the company “employed 1,200 workers, and all but 24 were Navajo, making Fairchild the nation’s largest non-government employer of American Indians.”

    In 1975, the Fairchild-Navajo partnership took a dramatic turn that spelled its demise. With the semiconductor industry suffering from the crippling U.S. recession at the time, Fairchild laid off 140 Navajo employees in Shiprock, which today still has a population of only a little more than 8,000 residents. The layoffs were a blow to the community. A group of 20 locals, armed with rifles, responded by occupying the plant for a week.

    While the episode eventually ended peaceably, Fairchild decided to shutter entirely and move its operation overseas, further compromising trust in corporate interests on Navajo land.

    Women’s roles in manufacturing and assembling electronics are often under-recognized. Schultz taps into ideas around gendered labor, visibility, and the slippery notion of “progress.” Through the lens of Navajo history and craft, she addresses paradigm shifts in technology, economics, and social change through the language of fiber.

    You can see “Replica of a Chip” in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, which continues through March 2, 2025.

    Detail of “”Replica of a Chip”

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    Dense Fields of Colored String Comprise Expressive Portraits by Artist Joshua Adokuru

    
    Art
    #nails
    #portraits
    #thread
    #woolJanuary 26, 2022Grace EbertAll images © Joshua Adokuru, shared with permissionBlending sturdy metal with the soft warmth of wool, Joshua Adokuru winds vibrant fibers around precisely placed nails that anchor his expressive and abstract portraits. The Abuja-based artist always incorporates strings in shades of blue, which fill amorphous shapes highlighting the subject’s face or defining the checkered pattern of a sweater. It’s “a natural color, a color of the sky, a color of the sea,” he says, noting that he gravitates toward bold, fantastical hues for skin tones. “Blue has this feeling of peace, a feeling of serenity.”Formally trained in computer science, Adokuru has been experimenting with different mediums since secondary school, but it wasn’t until spring of 2020 that he started working with thread. His pieces, which are often larger than life, begin with a photograph of a child or friend, which are then translated into a simple sketch on a wooden board. Adokuru accentuates the figure’s silhouette, facial features, and any motif on their clothing or in the backdrop with nails that are glued in place, sprayed with black paint, and finally covered in taught thread. Because the artist is most concerned with capturing his subjects’ exact expressions, he always completes the eyes last.Adokuru will show some of his works in New York this fall, and you can glimpse his process on Instagram. (via Lustik)
    #nails
    #portraits
    #thread
    #woolDo stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now! Share this story  More

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    Colorful Raw Wool Is Twisted into Expressive Busts by Salman Khoshroo

    
    Art

    #busts
    #sculpture
    #self-portrait
    #wool

    September 27, 2021
    Grace Ebert

    All images © Salman Khoshroo, shared with permission
    Complementing his series of raw wool portraits, Iranian artist Salman Khoshroo shapes chunks of dyed fibers into expressive busts. The figurative sculptures capture an array of emotions and vary in abstraction, sometimes using aqua rovings for lips and eyelids and others remaining more faithful to a subject’s features. Whether an intimate self-portrait or mischievous character outfitted with jackal teeth, the pieces are evidence of Khoshroo’s perceptive, nuanced practice. “Constructing the face with transparent layers of thinned wool creates depth, much like glazing in painting,” he writes about his process. “I make self-portraits regularly about one every year. This one is the first sculpture and has a unique presence. (It) reminds me of my own mortality.”
    Khoshroo recently moved from Tehran to London to study at Goldsmith’s University, and you can follow his work, which includes impasto portraits and other fiber-based sculptures, on Instagram.

    #busts
    #sculpture
    #self-portrait
    #wool

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    Wrinkled Drapery and Speckled Orbs Disguise the Figures of Jessica Calderwood’s Peculiar Sculptures

    
    Art
    Craft

    #clay
    #found objects
    #identity
    #metal
    #sculpture
    #wool

    August 24, 2021
    Grace Ebert

    “Digging Heels,” copper, enamel, blown glass, porcelain, glass pins, and milk paint, 4 x 6 x 12 inches. All images © Jessica Calderwood, courtesy of Momentum Gallery, shared with permission
    Indiana-based artist Jessica Calderwood imbues her whimsically camouflaged figures with questions about the female psyche. Whether covered by a polka-dotted orb or stuck in a ruffled tube of fabric, her nondescript women are temporarily trapped by their environments, their only defining features the sleek black pumps or striped kneesocks that stick out from their disguise. This concealment, Calderwood says, serves as “a negation, a censoring or denial of what lies beneath. These anthropomorphic beings are at once, powerful and powerless, beautiful and absurd, inflated, and amputated.”
    Deftly melding historical techniques with contemporary themes of identity, each of the works is rooted in traditional craftsmanship. A focus on mixed media is at the center of Calderwood’s broad body of work, which spans metalsmithing, jewelry, and wall-based ceramics, and many of her projects blend materials like enamel, porcelain, polymer clay, and felted wool to further evoke craft forms.
    Many of the pieces shown here are all on view at Asheville’s Momentum Gallery through September 7, and you can find more of Calderwood’s peculiar sculptures on her site and Instagram.

    “Plop,” copper, enamel, porcelain, glass micro-beads, milk paint, and gold luster, 6 x 8 x 6 inches
    “Ivory Tower,” copper, brass, polymer, blown glass, vintage plastic buttons, glass pinheads, porcelain, milk paint, and enamel, 5 x 10 x 10 inches
    “Stacked,” aluminum, powder coating, cast bronze, brass, blown glass, ceramic decals, porcelain, and milk paint, 15 x 6 x 6 inches
    “Shortcake” (2019), copper, enamel, porcelain, rayon flocking, glass head pins, and milk paint
    Left: “Succulent” (2014), slip-cast vitreous china, brass, stainless steel, polymer clay, milk paint, 5 x 4 x 4 inches. Right: “Shade” (2017), slip-cast vitreous china, felted wool, head pins, milk paint, stainless steel, and sterling silver, 6 x 4 x 4 inches
    “Public and Private,” copper, electroplated enamel, porcelain, milk paint, and steel, 7 x 13 x 4 inches
    “Spout,” copper, enamel, glass microbeads, porcelain, pearls, sterling silver, and milk paint, 9 x 5 x 4 inches
    “Twist,” copper, enamel, glass seed beads, powder coating, porcelain, milk paint, and brass, 9 x 9 x 5 inches

    #clay
    #found objects
    #identity
    #metal
    #sculpture
    #wool

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