Woven wall hangings by Emma Terweduwe
by admin
In this issue of the “What’s on your Loom” series, we’re featuring the works of Emma Terweduwe, a Belgian textile designer and artist, specialising in jacquard weaving. Her pieces are luxurious and expressive, combining natural and durable materials, strong and colourful graphic design, and her unique process of felting woven fabrics.
Works…
This new series of woven wall hangings made on the TC2 loom originate from an ongoing drawing research about the overlapping transparencies of shapes and colours. The series started with pastel drawings and embroideries I made where I played with compositions of different shapes overlapping each other. In doing so, new interesting shapes and colour combinations were created. For my pieces on the TC2 loom, I translated these drawings into designs with just two weft colours as I wanted to play with the effect of shading in the warp and weft and really focus on the graphics of the structures itself. So to create these pieces, I used double weave and a bold mix of different structures with a lot of texture such as a twill gradient, combined with a waffle structure and floating threads, for example.
The pieces are each woven with a combination of wool, cotton and linen, which is very defining in my work. I really love to play with different natural materials and colours because they have great tactile qualities. In the designs I worked with bold contrasting and complementary tones on one hand (blue/ purple with orange/red and Blue with olive green piece) and in the two other designs I combined a lighter and a darker tone (such a the green and lilac or orange and pink combinations) to create different expressions using the same structure variations.
By mixing colour tones and yarns in one weft, I was able to create a very interesting play between the different structures and colours. I’ve mainly worked with larger industrial jacquard looms before in my work, but I really like the freedom the TC2 loom gives you while creating your pieces. Since I’m a very intuitive person when it comes to my creative process, I love the possibilities of jacquard technique in combination with the slowness of the handwork. These pieces are woven on a loom with 36 cm width, so I’m planning on working them out in bigger pieces now. These works are created on the TC2 loom from TexLab Liège, a place were artists and designers can rent out the loom to experiment and develop prototypes for their work.
About…
After graduating in Textile Design from Ghent’s KASK Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Emma Terweduwe has collaborated with various brands and institutions, from Henrik Vibskov and Bless to the Tilburg Textile Museum, before establishing her own studio by the end of 2020. By making textiles that are meant to stimulate our sense of touch, Terweduwe’s tactile works offer a critique on our fast-paced and superficial society, which increasingly values appearance over substance. For Emma, collaboration with other master artisans is a central component of her philosophy – both as a means to create a textile piece of the highest quality, and as a way to preserve important local crafts and traditions. Her approach is deliberately slow and considered, applying digital tools to analogue processes without compromising on the characteristics of a handmade object. Using natural materials with subtle yet expressive properties, her woven works assume an organic and tactile feeling, brought into the present by bold graphic patterns.
Links…
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