CONNECTING HEAVEN & EARTH
Text from the FANTASIA solo show at Galerie Maria Wettergren in Paris.
By Maria Wettergren, september 2023
Emdal’s first solo exhibition in the gallery, Fantasia, appears as a fluid stream of works and places from Casa Balandra in Mallorca to Rome, followed by Copenhagen and Skagen in Denmark. For the exhibition, the Danish artist has been working on a new family of textile sculptures, which she has delicately handwoven in Icelandic wool, using her own fusion technique, Touch, based on a carpet knot technique and a special brushing, transforming the fibers into subtle layers of fur-like poetry. Emdal’s creative approach could be characterized as nomadic, “searching for symbiotic energies in serene places to create works with an embracing ambience”, to paraphrase the artist.
For the past seven months, the artist has been moving to a new location with her vertical nomadic carpet loom, watercolors and a vintage analogue camera, where she has been exploring ancient textile history, cultural history, sitespecific colors and childhood memories, in the company of creative communities. Each place has generated one or several sitespecific works: The Majorcan Ikat tradition has thus been a great source of inspiration for Emdal’s intense Mother of Fire, with its fiery, flaming pattern of blue and orange colors, whereas the Egyptian and Coptic textile heritages have influenced Lady Pharaoh and Murex 4ever with their strong purple nuances as a symbol of cultural richness, exchange and wealth. Both the Ikat weaving and the Coptic textile tradition point towards the Silk Road with its abundance of exchange in terms of textiles, precious items and knowledge, travelling through time and history, a great source of inspiration for Emdal’s rainbow-like Silky Way. The enigmatic work, Murex 4ever, born from a marriage of Mediterranean culture and the windy, wild landscapes of North Jutland, leads the way to another Skagen work, the poetic Piccolo Pellicano. As in the former work, Emdal is again inspired by a little sea snail, not the Phoenician Murex snail, which gave its precious purple color to centuries of art, but the Danish marine snail, A Pelicans Foot, emerging from the deep water of the most Nordic point of Denmark , glistening in the sun on the beach of Skagen. Long time after the snail has died, it is still there through its shell “...reminding us of eternity and the beauty we can leave behind.”
Emdal characterizes herself as a textile composer, transforming emotions and ambiances into tangible textile structures, and her works are indeed ethereal and poetical like music. Influenced by nature and textile traditions of the past, yet with a strong futuristic appearance, her Touch works evoke hybrid aesthetics and timeframes, offering widespread associations, such as animal furs, butterflies, ceremonial artefacts and luscious parures. Sensitive and sensual, the wool sculptures vibrate with the slightest air and seem almost alive, like creatures from outer space, or exotic species from the deep sea - another great inspiration to the artist, besides science fiction and music.
Emdal’s way of working may seem close to the meaning of the Greek word phantasia, which is usually translated as imagination. However, in Greek thought the word always retains a connection with the verb phainomai, “I appear”, which refers both to the psychological capacity to receive, interpret, and even produce appearances and to those appearances themselves. Signe (and what a felicitous name!) receives and interprets phenomena, while producing new enigmatic appearances. She is spiritually and intellectually nourished by culturally rich places, and she considers the Fantasia exhibition as a long line of connective past and future threads, where movement and changes of scenery have had a great impact on her and her artworks. These cultures are not only studied, they are digested and absorbed through an intimate, spiritual process, turned towards nature and the universe. In the words of the artist: “I am inspired by ancient & indigenous cultural philosophies and their way of connecting sky & earth through handmade objects, with more than just respect for mother earth. They saw her as the boss.”
Graduating from the Kolding School of Design in 2007 with an MA in textile design, specialized in Jacquard knitting techniques and conceptual textile structures, Emdal has fifteen years of experience with both handwoven and digital textile art, ranging from fashion textiles to highly complex art tapestries. Although very different from her Touch sculptures, it is interesting to note that her early works reveal the same inspirational sources and working methods, i.e. art history, ancient textiles, cultural and philosophical studies, feminism, interdisciplinarity and spiritual processes.
One of her first important works, Astrid’s Rose, a Jacquard knitted tapestry made in 2015, when the artist was invited by the National Gallery of Denmark to create a tapestry by interpreting a work from their permanent collection for their group show, Mix It Up, is an interesting example. Emdal’s choice, a painting by the Danish painter, Astrid Holm (1876-1937), entitled Rose sets the Table (1914), is significant, both from an aesthetic and political point of view: By focusing on the roses and the vibrant colours in Holm’s painting – red, yellow and pink – she creates a tapestry, in which the atmospheric colours of the painting are woven into the structure of the textile, becoming the main theme. Emdal uses the flower explosion in the tapestry as a way of expressing the emancipation theme, presented in the painting, which is also core to Astrid Holm’s own biography. As a female painter and tapestry weaver, Astrid Holm fought for female artists’ rights and for the recognition of tapestry weaving as an art form in Denmark. In Emdal’s words: “I want Astrid’s Rose to bloom. I want her to hold her head up high, look ahead and unfold in all her gentleness and strength, shining. Long enough, she has been standing in the shadow of her male modernist colleagues. This brave and powerful cosmopolitan paintress.” Emdal continues her erudite research and symbiotic dialogues with older works from various museum collections in her following project from 2016, when she obtains a grant from The Danish Art Foundation to translate her Jacquard knitted tapestry into digitally woven Jacquard tapestries at the Textiel Lab Tilburg in Holland. With her characteristic fondness of connecting past and future realms, the artist stays in a former medieval nunnery and creates, in only five days, no less than four double-sided tapestries in linen and Merino wool, inspired by ancient textile pieces from different museum collections: Blue Angel is thus drawn from a 3000 years-old indigo colored Japanese textile, whereas Turkish Angel is inspired by a Turkish Islamic miniature painting from around 1600. White Rose and Indian Rose were on the other hand influenced by an Indian textile work from around 1700, as well as medieval symbols.
In 2019, Emdal is offered a solo exhibition at the Skagens Museum, dedicated to the famous Danish 19th century painter, Anna Ancher (1859-1935). Entitled Anna’s Roots, the artist engages in a deep dialogue with Anna Ancher through her installation of seven Jacquard knitted tapestries, interpreting among other the colors and ambiences from the paintings “Appraising the Day’s Work” (1883), painted jointly by Anna and Michael Ancher. Emdal’s aim is to capture the substance of the Danish impressionist’s work in an act of symbiotic creation, and in the words of the artist... “My threads, colours and patterns are combined to create an essence of the knowledge we have concerning Anna Ancher and her close artistic collaborations with her husband Michael Ancher, connecting threads between the past and present.”
Emdal’s textile ‘translation’ of Ancher’s painting is so vivid that some visitors feel as if the tapestries are animated with Ancher’s spirit. Lisette Vind Ebbesen, the director of the museum, shares with us the following anecdote: “The other day, I heard someone standing in the room point to one of the tapestries and say: ‘It looks like Anna Ancher’ and I understand what she meant. You have a nice feeling that 7 new people have entered the room. 7 people whom you have never met before, but whom you still feel you know. I am impressed and very fascinated by the personality and intensity of the tapestries, colors and patterns. It is a very sensual experience, which leads one’s thoughts to both images, people and spaces from the time of the Skagen painters, and thus binds past and present together in a very strong and fine way.”*
This sensual, almost animistic feeling that the woven works seem to embody a spiritual presence reaches an unprecedented level in Emdal’s Touch works, developed from 2018 and onwards, starting with My Little Islandic Pony, followed by Mermaid, Khrysos, Tara 21 and Rosa C. The Icelandic wool seems to introduce a heightened attention tosensitivity and to textile as a living material in her work, and from now on, she primarily unfolds her research through the delicate Icelandic wool, a very natural fiber, which according to the artist is able to live, if treated the right way. For Emdal, it is crucial to “let the fibers breathe and unfold in my hands, while guiding them slowly and protecting the wool, leaving space for the yarn to grow in its own pace. Just like mothers do…”
Care and softness are important qualities to Emdal, who proposes gentleness as an alternative to cold and fast progress. The artist is interested in cultivating what she calls “The superpower of sensitivity. She continues…: Without softness and gentleness, humans are nothing but boring mind-machines. Society grew into habits of pushing hard to move forward, leaving no spaces, no room for love, no emotional appreciation…. This has to change, and the first step is to learn how to even notice the subtle nuances. If humans cannot see them, feel them or value them, they can never learn to appreciate and collaborate with nature.”
In order to observe the subtle nuances, a certain distance needs to be maintained. The Touch sculptures are, despite their name, not to be touched, regardless of their irresistible tactility. If they are touched, they are altered in their perfect, frosty appearance, like a finger in a candy-floss. This paradox creates a sublime frustration, which not only heightens the pleasure of pure contemplation, but also provokes a feeling of awe and protection for the delicate creations or creatures (characteristically, Emdal often names her works like persons or animals, referring to them as she). They are fantasies, chimeras, mysterious appearances… Please do not touch. Let yourself be touched.
More images from the FANTASIA soloshow via this link