Textile conference – Heritage meets the future.
30.th of March 2019
10.00 – 15.00 NA conference at Veröld – The house of Vigdís
For more information and tickets: https://www.nordictextileart.net/nordic-textile-meeting-in-iceland-2019-heritage-meets-the-future/

 

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKERS AT THE CONFERENCE:

The Textile Art of tomorrow

Jessica Hemmings writes and lectures about textiles. She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999 and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, is published by kalliope paperbacks under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (2008). She has taught at Central Saint Martins, Rhode Island School of Design, Winchester School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art. In 2010 she edited a collection of essays titled In the Loop: Knitting Now published by Black Dog and in 2012 edited The Textile Reader (Berg) and wrote Warp & Weft  (Bloomsbury). Her editorial and curatorial project, Cultural Threads, is a book about postcolonial thinking and contemporary textile practice (Bloomsbury: 2015) accompanied by a travelling exhibition Migrations (2015-2017). From 2012-2016 Jessica was Professor of Visual Culture and Head of the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. She is currently Professor of Crafts & Vice-Prefekt of Research at the Academy of Design & Crafts (HDK), University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

 

Archeology of the future

Philip Fimmano is a contemporary fashion and lifestyle specialist, contributing to Trend Union’s books, Bloom magazine and strategic studies for various international brands. He works in industries as varied as fashion, interiors, beauty, food and retail. In 2011, Philip co-founded Talking Textiles with Lidewij Edelkoort, an ongoing initiative to promote textile awareness and innovation through touring exhibitions, a trend magazine, a student prize and educational conferences. He is also a curator of contemporary design exhibitions for international museums, and has spoken about art and design at institutions such as Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and Nordiska museet in Stockholm. Philip currently mentors the Forecasting Masters at Polimoda in Florence.

 The sheep in me

Bryndís Bolladóttir a pioneer and a textile designer who runs a studio and a production company in Iceland. Bryndis works on the border between design and arts, and her inspiration is mainly from architecture and art. Playfulness plays an important role in Bryndís creations and characterizes her presentation and the endless possibilities of her ideas. Bryndís has focused on sound installations the last few years. Her goal has been to make functional design which increases the sound in the actual space but at the same time lets it play an important part in the architectural space. For her works she mainly uses Icelandic wool both as an inspiration and as the main material. She has won several prices for her work in Iceland and internationally. You can find her work in several public places in Iceland as well as abroad. Her base units, KULA & Lína are produced in Iceland and Italy. The base units have now been distributed in three continents.

 

Aspiration for equilibrium.

Katrín Þorvaldsdóttir is an artist with a passion for seaweed.  She has been using seaweed as a material in her art since returning home to Iceland in 1993 after studying and working as a puppeteer in Spain.  She started using seaweed to make masks and puppets, and experimented using seaweed in scenography and costumes.

In order to continue working with seaweed as a material for design it was clear that it was necessary for her to undertake more serious research to find out how it could be processed in a sustainable way.  Her main reason for using seaweed has always been to work with a natural material while avoiding using chemicals. “With nature all around us in Iceland it is the most natural thing to use what we already have at hand, in a “circular” way – to give back to nature what we take from it, that is the main challenge facing us all today.

My vision is to give the coming generation the opportunity to work with nature in a sustainable and profitable way”.

 

Hacking the Weaving Tools

Kadi Pajupuu  Associate Professor, Pallas University of Applied Sciences

Her invention Rail Reed is an adjustable weaving reed allowing to change the warp density and fabric width while weaving. Stepping reed is an attachment to normal reed that enables to push weft yarn in waves while weaving. Together with Marilyn Piirsalu, Kadi has been  giving Rail Reed courses in Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Netherlands. Railreed is used by inventive weavers in USA, Japan, Australia and Africa and Europe.

In 2016 I entered a Hackathon in Tallinn– a competition where you pitch your idea in front of the engineers and try to gather a team of 4 members that will help to build the prototype in 48 hours. My idea was a 3D printer that uses conventional yarns that are placed according to pre programmed path around the rigid elements that support the warp. After the weaving is done the rigid elements are removed from the structure, so that only woven structure remains.

Kadi believes in sharing ideas, questioning traditions and cooperation. In the last years she has developed many intuitive weaving tools that challenges the traditional way of working with yarn and textiles

Textile surface – identity

Isabel Berglund

Isabel Berglund travels extensively with her work and has exhibited in Europe, Asia and the USA. Her work has been featured in numerous publications.

Isabel creates surprising, imaginative and often monumental works in hand-knit yarn. With this choice of artistic medium she reaches out to her audience with a familiar material and traditional techniques. In her artistic process, however, she transforms the traditional craft to create unusual, and often spectacular, objects to convey a symbolic image and to challenge our perception of reality. She combines elements from knitting with features from art and industrial design, adding deliberate twists in meaning. Her works have a sensuous, tactile character that invites people to reach out and interact with the objects. Throughout her artistic practice, her main themes are identity and surfaces, with the relationship between body and artwork as a key element. Her main source of inspiration is everyday life, people, words and objects, and she often rephrases and recasts mundane objects by combining them with a play on words or a novel conceptual framework.

Conversation with Annie Albers

Kiyoshi Yamamoto a Japanese Brazilian textile artists who lives and works in Norway. In his work flouts between material and concept and  explores the relationship between colour and identity, activism and material experimentation. Kiyoshi graduated with a master’s from the Bergen Academy in 2013 and has already exhibited internationally and participated in diverse projects in London, Helsinki, Milan, Reykjavik, Riga and others places. His textile works have recently been acquired by The Norwegian National Museum for Arts, Crafts and Design in Trondheim, The National gallery in Oslo, KODE museum in Bergen and by the Norwegian Embassy in Brazil. Yamamoto is lately working in a series of large commission work for St. Olav Hospital in Trondheim Norway. Kiyoshi Yamamoto is also shortlisted to Sandefjord artist prize 2019.

Nordic Textile Meeting in Iceland 2019 – Heritage meets the future.
You will find the program and the registration form at our website. www.nordictextileart.net

The conference is sponsored by Nordisk Kulturfund og city of Reykjavík.