Touch, soft embrace, and body memory. These are the matters explored by Signe Emdal – a Danish master artisan and designer in fiber materials crafting soft textile concepts since 2007. It can be said that Signe Emdal’s work transforms ambiances and emotions into material constructions with physical textile tools, focusing on creating a smoother way to collaborate in today’s hectic world.
The Romantic Garden
Signe Emdal: My practice is to craft physical textile materials through the information I absorb in life and then study how this embodiment of information can be done in a very gentle & kind way. Creating a serene space is very easy and natural for me. I call my practice ‘The romantic garden’.
Signe Emdal: Intrigued by the poetry of nature, I combine a free heart with the solid hands of a gardener, scanning ambiances and transcending the pieces of information into colorful layers of textile constructions, through a variety of digital and analog textile machinery, raw yarns, fibers, and photography. Within the right serene conditions and locations, I hand-build materials and fuse old textile methods with contemporary tools.
It takes patience, subtle conditions, and gentle slowness to make a grand flower tree come alive. They´ll need a different kindness but they would love to grow next to a certain kind of mos.
MY LITTLE ICELANDIC PONY & Touch Technique
Signe Emdal: Reflecting on the matter of body memory, I created a new fusion technique called TOUCH, firstly developed in her MY LITTLE ICELANDIC PONY piece – knotted in Lopi wool by Emdal during a residency in Iceland, supported by the Danish Art Council and exhibited at the Round Tower in Copenhagen in an exhibition called “Is this colour?”.
Signe Emdal: Touch is a delicate merge of Icelandic wool fibers + carpet knots transformed into subtle layers of fur-like shades of poetry, reflecting human body energy layers and body memory from touchy experiences. MY LITTLE ICELANDIC PONY is the first piece made from this technique and explores ‘our layers of invisible fur’, wherein our living skin is the direct transition to a human’s inner life. The heart.
Interview with Signe Emdal from Emdal Studio.