| art.description.project | When the Textile museum in Borås invited me to exhibit in their black gallery I decided to weave in relation to the challenging square exhibition space and two important words: silk and sorrow. Could I make the white silk shimmer in darkness, as if the textile contained its own light? I decided to weave a funeral pall in silk/wool and drape it over a coffin and place in in the centre. It was important to me to anchor the exhibition with the coffin and its textile; just as death always anchors life.
Together with Malena Karlsson, curator and intendent, we formed the exhibition as a chamber, playing with light and darkness. The other textiles exhibited, were suspended to create shadows on the floor. Four dark grey pillars divide the gallery space into smaller sections, allowing both viewing intimacy as well as volume and distance.
The exhibition is a retrospective and includes 10 indivdual works and installations from 1995-2019. Exhibiting over twenty years of my woven artistic practice together exposed several working patterns I had been only subconsciously aware of previously: loyalty to a specific weaving palette of neutral tones and perhaps more importantly an ongoing investigation into the ways the woven structure can assist in the communication of delicacy, care and shrouding.
Weaving funeral palls has been part of my artistic practice for a long time. Both the weaving process and the experience of ritual use unique to these textiles in funerals has led to valuable insights about the textile’s capacity to assist in sorrow and loss – acting in a tactile and quiet way. We handle those textiles, with them we say farewell and they become part of the ritual act. In the central exhibition space the coffin, with its funeral pall, created silence in a different way.
When exhibiting the funeral textiles I often think of the exhibition phase as some kind of rehearsal, a pre-moment, a pause: “the real thing“ is happening elsewhere. Of course, this has to do with the lack of action – no touch, no folding, no wrapping is allowed in the gallery context. But what I gain, and hopefully visitors gain, is reflection, memories of other passages in life. Awareness.
Part of the exhibition unfolds the textile research “I sin linda” (Infant wrapping Cloth) by showing blankets in different sizes aimed for children that die during pregnancy or delivery. I initiated a clinical research study which took place in 2017-2018. During preparations for the study midwives also pointed out the need of blankets to be available for late miscarriages and abortions. I wanted to hand weave these small blankets and invited HDK students and colleagues to form a weaving research group. To date, we have hand woven more than 90 blankets and a few of them, not yet been delivered to hospitals, are shown.
A book, I sin linda 2017-19, captures reflections around the weaving process and the ritual use of textiles in hospitals. The book was launched at the exhibition opening and during the following week at the Röhsska museum in Gothenburg.
The result of the medical study is yet to be published but in the exhibition my artistic response is shown. In the study midwives asked for even smaller blankets for foetuses dying in their very earlier stages of life and I have woven in silk and merino wool, 36 even smaller blankets which are 42x42 cm. One dark blue or black weft tread on each of them form in the exhibition a pattern as they are being placed side by side in a square. On the gallery wall one quotation is written:
We are not present when parents, midwives, and assistant nurses shroud a dead infant.
But we are present throughout the entire weaving process, which involves choosing threads, weaving, hemming, and felting.
Through the blankets, we try to speak of loss, grief, and the deeply human need to shroud.
During the exhibition period several seminars, presentations and one workshop took place. The public workshop took place at the Röhsska museum during a research seminar: The Weaving Workshop Revisited organised by PhD candidates Emelie Röndahl and Rosa Tolnov Clausen. In this workshop I wanted to find out whether the very intimate and often lonely production of sewing wrapping cloths could occur together with a larger number of people who might be strangers to each other. Three sizes of blankets were sewn out of designed blanket material. Each participant chose a size, aimed for a fully delivered child, delivered around week thirty, or in early stage of pregnancy. Cutting, unravelling edges, sewing, folding and talking were the activities that took place.
Connected to this exhibition, I was interviewed in the radio (P4) live from the graveyard in Borås. Many questions were related to the very small blankets exhibited in the exhibition – how seldom we speak about late medical abortions or miscarriages. It is a silent sorrow.
Link to radio programme:
https://t.sr.se/2pvIt9K
Digital link to book:
https://issuu.com/universityofgothenburg/docs/making-narratives-4
Exhibition:
https://textilmuseet.se/utstallningararkiv/iritensrumommotetmellantygochmanniska.5.6e442ca916cb2eea3c3157b.html | sv |
