LONGING: the artists

Marcia Harvey Isaksson (born in 1975 in Harare, Zimbabwe) is a curator, exhibition designer and artist based in Stockholm. She runs Fiberspace, an arena for textile arts, crafts and design that she founded in 2015 and for which she was awarded the Dynamo Award by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee in 2022. She also works as a freelance curator and combines this with design assignments from various museums in Sweden where she has developed concepts for exhibitions covering everything from cultural historical collections to societal issues. In her own artistic practice, she uses textile methods to investigate place, belonging and heritage with a focus on knowledge and storytelling.

Julia Bland (born in 1986) lives and works in Brooklyn, USA. Bland’s geometric compositions are created through an intuitive and cyclical approach to assembly and dis-assembly. Through weaving, cutting, dyeing, sewing, burning and painting, the surface becomes a visible record of her evolving, multifaceted process. “Making is not really about following a certain process or tradition,” Bland writes, “but about the way all things change.” Images emerge as formal evolutions embedded in the material structure. Trees, bodies, mountains, hands, bridges, and planets come in and out of focus. Through the rhythm of making and unmaking, Bland develops the structures, symbols, and patterns that bind disparate elements into a whole.

Mark Corfield-Moore (born in 1988 in Bangkok. Lives and works in London) is a painter whose practice holds woven textiles at its core. The conception of fabrics as nomadic objects is fundamental to his work. Investigating the historic use of textiles in the production of rugs and tents, items that are portable and attached to no specific location, his understanding of fabrics and his practice at large is rooted in this sense of transience. These ideas draw, in part, on the artist's own mixed Thai and British heritage, a diasporic identity he consciously reflects upon and interrogates in his work.

The works of Kristina Müntzing (born in 1973. Lives and works in Malmö, Sweden) explore the relationstips between art and the crafts and create a visual language for the broad themes of labour and specifically the history of female workers. Images from differing periods and geographies are sliced and woven together, becoming both image and pattern, map and archive. Her process simultaneously destroys and creates using the scalpel to penetrate the surface. Müntzing believes by manually digitalizing the image, she can save it from oblivion, just as the jpeg loses information each time the image is saved.

Emelie Röndahl (born in 1982 in Sweden. Lives and works in Falkenberg) is a weaving artist who for several years has worked with figurative rya, a traditional Scandinavian weaving technique that historically has been used to weave blankets that imitate sheep skins where the woolly side lays against the body. Central to her practice is the two-sidedness of the technique. The shaggy rya-side juxtaposes the smooth underside, and the works are often installed with both sides visible to the spectator. Emelie sees her rya as disrupting versions of traditional rya and contemporary tapestries, and she uses untraditionally long and hanging threads that give the works a three-dimensionality. The images are retrieved from anonymous digital search engines interspersed with private photos from her phone, followed by quick sketching and then hand-weaving.

Mariana Silva Varela (born in 1973 in Chile. Lives and works in Stockholm) is a weaver and textile artist whose practice investigates current and historical migration and how it changes and continues to affect our world, both culturally and artistically. Silva weaves fictional worldviews into her work, creating a form of futuristic anthropology. At the same time, she investigates and questions contemporary nationalist attitudes and the way they preserve colonial ideals in terms of cultural identity. The work has grown out of a curiosity about identity and belonging, in part due to the artist's own experience as a political refugee.

Côme Touvay (born in 1971) is a French art weaver who shares his time between Paris and the Charente region. He develops his work through diverse experimental weaving projects exploring a wide variety of weaving techniques and forms of plasticity, from ancient Polynesian animism to the botanical species found at his rural studio in Charente. His work features sophisticated textures that capture light in a broad spectrum of materials and natural or synthetic chromatic effects. Touvay explores weaving as a language gathering diverse cultural influences and focuses on a dialogue between primary forms of plasticity and its interpretation and communication.