Tilburg, home of the famous Dutch Textile Museum, hosts a textile weekend every year. The museum and lots of galleries all over town show everything textile, most of it very artful, some only vaguely connected to fiber. My friend Juliet and I went there yesterday. I am going to share lots of pictures here – I did not edit them too much because it would take me all day. So please take for that for granted.
First of all we went to see my friend Inge Koenen‘s exhibition called ‘Life is a rabbit’ (Galerie Kokon)
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| Translation: Life is a rabbit. In high school,in biology class, we saw a movie that showed a few bacteria in a petri dish. They multiplied at great speed. After only a little while they suffocated because there were too many of them. It told us: that is what happens if we don’t act. It made a huge impression on me. |
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Inge spent the best part of three months sewing a few hundred rabbits out of verhuisdekens (the blankets movers use to protect stuff in their vans) and stuffing them. Even her husband helped cutting loads of old sheets into tiny 3 x 3 cm squares! Inge laughed away all those people telling her to just use fiberfill stuffing from the craft stores: she wanted the rabbits to feel in a specific way, not all soft and cuddly, but like they had real substance.
She calls it an interactive installation – visitors get to decide how to walk over or around the poor little beasties.
Juliet wanted to take a few home, but removing rabbits was not allowed. Although someone suggested to Inge to sell them and then draw white chalk lines around every rabbit that was gone, an idea she approved of.
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| Inge Koenen, talking to visitors |
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| Translation: The world is a graveyard. What is the dead would not decay? After all those centuries the world is one big graveyard, a mass of dead under the surface. Our history is not about heroic acts, but about living and dying and (most often) being forgotten. |
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| Inge showing us the Textile Weekend staff is even providing specially labeled bottled water |
I was weirdly interested in all the stuff lying around the exhibition. Yellow stickers to collect for visitors – stick ‘m on your little Textile Route booklet and if you have six, hand them in to the museum. The winner gets to design a tea towel that will be executed by the museum.
Did we collect those stickers? Of course we did!
Do we want to design our own tea towels? Yes we do!
Do we have any chance of winning? Of course not, there are thousands of
visitors.
So are we willingly and knowingly deluded consumers? Of course we are!
I simply loved
Calon’s own screenprinted and machine embroidered dishcloths with daily objects. Because I am a sucker for anything connected to keeping house. God knows why, I hate doing the real thing.
And I adore the knitted parts and bolts to fix the plumbing of this fragile bath by
Désiree de Baar.She even provided knitting instructions for the tap! Be sure to check out
her website. She does the most wonderful things. A few years ago she went to old people’s homes to find knitters and recruted them to recreate entire living rooms – knitted chairs, tables, teapots and fireplaces! Her website is mostly in Dutch.
Fragile, skinlike, partly made out of lingerie bags by
Liesbeth Kaag who reiterated in kind:
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| Tilleke Schwarz, If, 2009. Hand embroidered on linen (62 x 72 cm) |
… who is world famous for her poetic, graffity-inspired work and rightly so. For a better look at her beautiful designs go to
her website.
We spent the rest of the afternoon at the Textile Museum. The museum is an old woolen blanket factory, that was turned into a museum in the 1980s. It hosts a mixture of old and state of the art textile machinery, making it a perfect spot for experimenting. Dutch fiber artists have prototypes made here and young and foreigh artists are invited for longer of shorter stays as artists in residence.
Since our computer network and/or Blogger is extremely slow at the moment – working on getting that fixed – I will write about the Museum part tomorrow. And about a Norwegian art student in residence who was weaving our entire history out in ribbon on a 19th century machine.
Hi Kitty,
So lovely to meet you, and to enter the great world of your blog. I feel like I was in the museum too. What a fantastic exhibition!
All the best
Sandra
Thanks for the positive comments on my work. There is a better picture on my website or I can send one to Kitty if she would like that.
All the best,
Tilleke
Kitty, what a fabulous virtual tour you just took me on! Loved it. Looks like such a fun exhibition. I remember you posting a picture of Inge, exhausted, face down in a pile of those rabbits! I love the idea of her "interactive installation" – it appeals to the child in me.
Wow, Kitty! You make me want to move to the Netherlands now! What a fantastic show! And I love all the work you shared, incredible. Especially how you shared it, your personality shines through. Inge's story made me laugh. I do think she should sell them and leave chaulk marks, that would be great. I can't wait to see more!