About Signe Emdal

~ since 2006

Visual artist and Master artisan Signe Emdal, creates Portraits & Original Structures.

Her practice is described as beyond material based, meaning that materials and cultural crafts techniques are the initial starting points for her creational processes. While tapping into those cultures, she is de-coding existing structures, social models, craft principles, the communal foundations for those crafts, and the sensitive human Inner Ear, through actual on-site engagement, spending time with local people and the landscape.

The artist lives within a constant open-ended planning of new frameworks for her next creational processes. Inside of those creational windows, she finds herself immersed in studying natural light and site-specific topics, with the intention of creating portraits and mirrors of both history and the present moment.

Signe has an effortlessly way of absorbing and trancending any subject that needs to be portrayed, and create performative “prints” of the source. The proces is improvised inside of her “windows”, and similar to artists practicing in mediums such as performance, music, photography, painting and clay.

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Signes artworks are fragments of existing principles, combined by hand to build Original Structures with analogue and digital tools. This part of her practice with building physical foundations for her portraits, is inspired by the Interstellar Medium (ISM) and rooted in the artist's technical 20 years of experience in tracking, archiving and decoding old or current crafts-structures, while building new structural expressions for the future.

Original Structures timeline 2005-2026

Tools : Analogue vertical looms, analogue vintage film-cameras, digital knitting machines, digital Looms, patterns, ornament and sketch work, watercolours and stained glass art.

Materials: Wool is at the heart of her practice since 20 years, along with two more recent materials, launching in 2026-2027: glass & vintage photography.

Shows: Signe had numerous solo and group exhibitions, such as the National Gallery of Denmark (2015), Skagen Art Museum (2019), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2020), Arden Asbæk Gallery (2022), PAD London (2022), Homo Faber Biennale (2022), Tefaf NYC (2023), Galerie Maria Wettergren in Paris (2023), TEFAF Maastricht (2023), Galerie Handwerck (2024), Zona Maco (2026) and Saatchi Gallery London (2026). Full CV here.

Next up: Signe´s solo show at the Aalto Museum: Maison Louis Carré in France (2027).

Awards & Collections: Her works are represented in prestiges private collections in the US and museum collections, such as Malmø Art Museum in Sweden, Skagen Kunstmuseer in Denmark and the collection of the Danish Art Foundation. In 2023, she was awarded the Martha & Paul Rene Gauguin Art prize, and in 2025, the Ole Haslund Art foundation prize. Full CV here.

Locations: Signe works in many locations world wide, with family anchors in Denmark. Movement, timelines and changes of scenery have a deep impact on her site-specific artworks, that aim to offer experiences of empowerment, flexibility and care towards a higher attention for the sensory body of all life.

~My body of work is my heart