Emelie Röndahl
Om Emelie Röndahl
"Crying Pixels: a practitioner’s narrative through woven rya - aspects of time in hand made practice”
KEYWORDS: Weaving, Rya, Time, Collaboration, Labour, Skill, Pixels
I am a weaving artist and PhD candidate in Crafts. My research starts with my pictorial weavings made in the Scandinavian weaving technique rya, exploring notions of fiber pixels and their way from downloaded images to fluffy textiles. By using images taken from Google, often - but not only - depicting scenes from the global textile industry, my research project considers visual ethics and time investments in hand weaving. The project’s written text and rya weaving are made together from a personal perspective and structured around my interest in subjects of labour, textile history and time consuming activity.
One of my ongoing investigations focuses on the repetition of one single image, which I call Serial Babies, where themes like pixel transference, repetition and the use of digital and analogue image making processes are explored. Serial Babies is as an inquiry into woven fiber art´s capacity to magnify and twist an image.
In 2018 my main focus is on collaborative processes in hand weaving, through a project commissioned from the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (2018) Google Weaving Stop-time – a project where approximately thirty weavers from around the world have come together online and share their studio work in response to a distributed assignment using rya knots on a Facebook group page. One of the project aims is to explore solitary versus collaborative weaving practices.
In the autumn of 2018 I will collaborate with Omforma in Malmö - a nonprofit organization, that aims to investigate and develop the conditions in the design area. Their work involves politics, research and conversations, focusing on making working life in the design industry more feminist, anti-racist, intersectional and inclusive.