At the end of our month at the Textile Center in Blonduos, we had an exhibition of the works we made during the month of May. We named our show Black Sheep after the orphan lamb we all fell in love with when we visited Johanna's farm. I am sure you will be happy to hear that the lamb was accepted by her fourth "mother" and was blissfully happy and milk drunk last we heard.
Juri, from the US and a student at Rhode Island School of Design, spent most of her working time in the weaving studio.
Anie is a teacher and researcher at Concordia University in Canada. Much of her work in Blonduos was experimental play with cyanotype, spinning Japanese paper and using the digital loom.
Mary spent her days creating hooked rugs inspired by our location. She is a talented author and rug artist and my travel companion from Minnesota.
I exhibited the pieces you have seen earlier in my blog. You can find their stories there.
Sarah, from Finland, spent most of her time weaving but had some fun dye studio time too. Her work was woven with yarns she had dyed with mushrooms and maybe a few plants. The felted mushroom pillow expresses her love for foraging and dyeing with the local mushrooms.
Ragna is a Norwegian designer working with stitched and stuffed fabric creations. I believe this was the first time the pieces moved from the wall to free floating mobile-like structures.
Laura from Canada, was also a rug maker. Using yarn and a punch needle, her rugs have a wonderful graphic design quality to them. The felted snowmobiles were made on the felting machine in the Textile Lab. They show her love for adventure at her home in Yellow Knife. Laura also designed our exhibition poster.
Klara, from Stockholm, was spending her second month in residency. May was spent mostly in the Lab working on the TC2 digital jacquard loom. She wove with cotton fabric as weft, but her pieces are far from your typical rag rug and are meant as wall pieces. She also made some wonderful pieces crocheted with fabric strips and then printed on.
MacKenzie, a professor at Alberta university of the Arts, wove a varafell on a warp weighted loom. A varafell is a cloak made by weaving in the coarser outer locks of sheep wool to create a pile that insulates and protects. These date from Viking times and were an important commodity at markets. MacKenzie's was 2 meters long with locks inserted every 4 shots of weft. Before he came to Iceland, MacKenzie had spun the warp and woven a band that incorporated the warp which could be attached to the loom. While in Blonduos, he separated the outer locks for pile and spun the softer inner wool for the weft from about 6 of Johanna's sheep. He was easily the hardest worker of the group. While the weaving was still on the loom for the exhibition, he wove into the night to finish the last few inches before he left the next day. I think that seeing the varafell on the loom and being woven was a great experience for the 20-30 guest we had at our opening.
After the opening ended, our group of residents celebrated with a wonderful 3 course dinner at the Brimslod Guesthouse. We had a delicious shrimp soup, arctic char with vegetables and sauces and a chocolate brownie-like cake with a berry sauce. We were in heaven. We found out the next day that we had eaten at one of the best restaurants in Iceland! What a wonderful way to celebrate our exhibition and our time together in Blonduos.
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