By Hilde Opedal Nordby
August 2018

Women Weaving Women (WWW) is a collection of home textiles that were handwoven on a TC2 digital loom in the spring of 2016. The collection is a contribution to the exhibit Future Traditions, a collaborative project between MOME (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) in Budapest and the University of Southeast Norway (Universitatet i Sørøst-Norge) at Rauland.  The collection focuses on representations of women in folk art and abstraction as a tool historically and today. 

Future traditions, 2015-2019

From 2014-2017 I studied for my bachelors degree and masters degree in traditional art and textiles at the University of Southeast Norway campus at Rauland.  During this period I participated in the collaborative project Future Traditions. The goal was to interpret traditional expressions of folk art from the two countries, Hungary and Norway, and to investigate how folk art and traditional patterns can find new life today, with a special focus on traditional handcrafts as a part of the work process. The exhibit consisted of the work of 21 students, with representation from several countries. The exhibit was shown in Budapest, Hungary; in Skien and Rauland in Norway; and in Bucharest, Romania. It will travel to Istanbul in Turkey in 2019. The exhibit includes works in textile, wood, metal, and mixed materials. 

Women Who Weave Women

The collection WWW took its starting point with a popular motif in Norwegian billedvev (tapestry) from 1500-1900, the so-called “virgin tapestries.” The pattern is taken from an image of the five wise and five foolish virgins, one of the several biblical themes that were woven from images spread through church art and illustrated pamphlets. In a rural society where people usually could not read or write, these pamphlets and coverlets had a strong narrative and instructive function. The coverlets were often woven for a woman’s marriage and represented the important shift from youth to adulthood, from virgin to mother. 

My work with the motif sprang from my interest in weaving and for how the female figure has been represented in folk art, with a special interest in how women represent themselves in the woven coverlets and thinking about how we represent ourselves today. During the 1900s weaving was an obvious way for a woman to express herself, and it has gradually become recognized as a form of artistic expression. Coverlets woven before 1900 were primarily woven as functional items for the household, but they can also be seen as an expression of a woman’s life. Even though craft has been seen as the basis for mens’ worklife for hundreds of years, textile handwork in the home has always been the women’s arena. WWW is my representation of women today, who are independent and strong, but at the same time in need of community and something that is larger than ourselves.

Abstraction in Folk Art

A book that has been inspirational is Professor Mikkel Tin’s De Første Formene (The First Forms),  which describes how geometric, abstract forms like the circle, cross, zig-zag, and rhombus are universal forms that form the basis of folk art around the world. This phenomenological approach that implies that people have an inherent expression that springs from folk arts’ self-taught, spontaneous practitioners, which again can be seen as an expression of their environment and world views.  

An interesting feature with the virgin tapestries is how the oldest preserved weavings from around 1600 have a richness of detail that tells the whole story of the wise and foolish virgins.  The earliest tapestries, which technically resembled German or Dutch tapestries, were likely woven by men who had established studios. Through the 1700s and 1800s  when it became common to weave figurative coverlets also in the countryside, the motifs changed and interesting compositions developed, in which the story of the virgins disappeared and the women in the tapestries stood as staunch women ringed by geometric decoration and natural forms. The religious story disappeared and was replaced by what I interpret as a collective world understanding—women as a part of something larger, with strength and knowledge from one another.  The tapestries show a strong understanding and knowledge of form, color and composition.  The representation is lively and individual, with strong roots to common patterns. 

Working with the TC2–Weaving and Drafting

WWW also involved research into working with a digital loom of the TC2 type, developed by Tronderud Engineering and a part of Digital Weaving Norway. The loom can raise each warp thread individually, opening new design possibilities. The loom works on the same principles as a Jacquard loom and is a link between handweaving and industrial processes. The advantages of a digital loom are the possibilities of expressions and integrating many weave structures. The drawback is that working a great deal on the computer distances the weaver from the weaving itself, and with digital weaving it becomes easy to think like a machine–to become consumed with perfection and a result that looks just like the one on the computer. Digital weaving takes away the spontaneity of handwork.  It takes longer to weave than on a floor loom because the machine requires time to pull up each of the threads, which gives a different rhythm and flow than working on a floor loom. 

The collection WWW consists of five long (.7 x 4 meters) wall pieces woven in eight-shaft satin weave where the warp and weft intersections are used to create light and dark sections.  The pieces were woven in red, green, blue, gold and white, all on black warp. The colors were inspired by those in the virgin tapestries. The motif was created in Illustrator and later combined using the same program. The weave structure was drawn in Photoshop and laid over the various areas of color in the composition. For each weft shot, the digital loom reads the pixels in the row to decide which threads should be raised. It is a challenge to combine different weave structures; it is necessary to weave many samples or have deep experience with combining weave structures to get a good result. Irregular shapes can give fuzzy lines between changes in the weave structures, which I experienced in my work. 

 

Why I’m a Weaver

Work with the collection and with the virgin tapestries has given me insight into the enormous amount of work that went into weaving the tapestries, the knowledge and skills of the weavers, and the communities in which they lived and wove. The conditions of our society and creative lives are completely different than when the original tapestries were woven, but that doesn’t stop us from being inspired by them. They spark our interest in their motifs, colors, and techniques–reasons they become only more intriguing. They give us riches today that we can build on.  I think that as long as we continue to weave and work with handcrafts, our knowledge and possibilities to understand the tapestries from within will live on.   

Hilde Opedal Nordby is a Norwegian textile artist, working with traditonal weaving techniques, as well as contemporary and digital weaving. She is based in a small village called Stokke, where she does custom made projects and teaches weaving around the country. She is educated in traditonal arts and crafts from the University of South-East Norway.