Exhibition Oases 2016 - Sýningin Vinjar
Textile Museum Blönduós Iceland
Haunted History, in Blönduós, Iceland.
If these walls could talk, they might sound like sirens of the sea.
The former women's school, Kvennaskólinn, is a local treasure to the textiles industry and history of northern Iceland.
The school is now a museum located in Blönduós (north west Iceland). Aðalbjörg, the former head mistress of the school channels the past, taking us through Minjastófa Kvennaskólinns (the exhibition of the former women's school).
The Kvennaskólinn building also hosts a Textiles Artist Residency (Textílsetur) that merges old fashioned rural charm with new contemporary textile arts.
With warm thanks to Aðalbjörg Ingvarsdóttir.
Video by morgantams.com
Málþing/Symposium: Bláklædda konan/Bundled-up in blue
29.8.2015 at the National Museum of Iceland.
Bundled-up in Blue – The Re-investigation of a Viking Age Grave (three out of four lectures are in English) Symposium based on a research on the bones and grave goods found in a settlement-era grave discovered in 1938 in East-Iceland
The programme of the symposium:
Dr. Steinunn Kristjánsdóttir Archaeologist:
The Viking Age Woman from Ketilsstaðir, East Iceland
Joe W. Walser III Osteologist:
Results of the Osteological Analyses of the Human Skeletal Remains
Coffee-break
Julia Tubman Conservator:
Conservation of fluid-preserved human remains from the burial
Michèle H. Smith Textile Specialist:
Textiles, Jewellery, Dress and Dates
The first lecture is in Icelandic, the other three in English. Moderator: Anna Lísa Rúnarsdóttir.
Everyone welcome!
Medieval Icelandic Textiles
An expert on Icelandic and Scandanavian textiles, Michele Hayeur Smith will explore current research on archaeological textile collections from ten Viking Age (AD 874-1100) mortuary sites and eleven settlements from the medieval period (AD 1100-1600), as well as medieval records, to shed new light on age-old associations between female embodiment and power in Norse culture and their transformations through time. Her interdisciplinary work integrates art, narrative, textile production, gender, power, and fertility.
Co-sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Program
Anthropology Distinguished Lecture
Bridgewater State University
Norse North Atlantic Textiles And Textile Production - Michèle Hayeur Smith
Norse North Atlantic Textiles and Textile Production: A Reflection of Adaptive Strategies in Unique Island Environments
Textile production was a key industry for the Norse colonies of the North Atlantic during the late Viking and Medieval period. In Iceland, textiles were so important that they were used as currency, used to pay tithes, taxes and fines throughout the medieval period. They were also traded both locally and internationally. Although their production was largely the product of women’s work, standards for the production of textiles intended for use in commerce and for legal payments were legally regulated by men and recorded in the law codes. In Greenland, textiles took on a different character and were used predominantly for clothing and other domestic applications. Here, adaptive strategies devised by women weavers focused on combating the increasing cold temperatures of the Little Ice Age. Not only did women weave cloth that was weft-dominant and densely beaten, but they also mixed other fibres in with sheep’s wool. The most common admixture was goat but occasionally other materials have been found. This strategy may have been undertaken to “stretch” an already depleting stock of wool or as a way to make cloth better adapted to environmental pressures. The Faroe Islanders devised yet another strategy, and while cloth does not appear to have been used as currency in ways similar to Iceland much of it may have been exported to Norway during the early medieval period, as the paucity of finished textiles in the Faroese collections is striking yet raw wool is not. Recent pilot research in Bergen, Norway, suggests that much of the textile assemblage found in the urban harbour-site of Bryggen, a hub of North Atlantic trade throughout the medieval period, stems from these North Atlantic colonies. This paper examines these separate yet interconnected records of women's production and the distribution and use of their products across the North Atlantic as evidence for local adaptation within social and environmental contexts of trans-North Atlantic dimensions.
Icelandic textile art exhibition
Speak like an Artist.
Delving deep into the intricacies of an entangled practice within textiles, these artists have found the humanity, the depth, and the imagination of viewing new work on show at The Icelandic Textile Center.
You too, can speak like an artist.
Tip: wear scarves, oversize coats, black rimmed glasses, and look very seriously at something. The words will come - you will evoke them.
With thanks to the 'artists':
Katharina and Elísabet Schneider
Guillaume Brisson-Darveau
Glory Kadigan
Catherine Hood
Michél Suave
MariePier St George
Melody Woodnutt
Video by morgantams.com
Quaker Tapestry Embroidery Demonstration - Bridget Guest
Bridget Guest demonstrates some embroidery in the Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum
The Story of Burnt Njal - tapestry
It's a culture related projects (medieval) that takes place in Saga Centre in Hvolsvollur , Refilstofu . The project has been running since 2013 and is about to sew the saga of Burnt Njal on a 90 meters long tapestry. Now 50 meters are completed on
April 26, 2016 and this is a video taken when we were rolling up the tapestry. 50 meters are now finished.
Njálurefillinn er menningartengt verkefni (miðalda) sem fer fram í Sögusetrinu á Hvolsvelli, Refilstofu. Verkefnið hefur verið í gangi síðan 2013 og snýst um að sauma Njálssögu á 90 metra langan refil. Nú er 50 metrum lokið 26. apríl 2016 og er þetta myndband tekið þegar verið var að rúlla upp. 50 metrum er nú lokið.
Show#32: ICICLES IN CAVES, Erika Lynne Hanson, Rachel Schmidhofer
Field Projects is pleased to present Show #32: ICICLES IN CAVES, a two person exhibition featuring the work of Erika Lynne Hanson and Rachel Schmidhofer. As a contemporary continuum to classic art historical genres such as Landscape Painting and Still Life Painting, Hanson and Schmidhofer contemplate what we have done and are doing to our environment, what the environment in turn does to us, how we naturalize what we do to each other, and how these “doings” are enacted in the media of representation during our lifetime.
Rachel Schmidhofer lives in New York City and makes still life oil paintings of aquariums, house plants, mineral collections, Plexiglas display cases and goldfish in bags. Through this domesticated collection we can trace the shadow of the wild from its hidden caves, ancient grottoes and mysterious fauna to our living room decor. What saves these works from simply documenting capitalist tokens of imperialism is Schmidhofer’s own sense of wonder and love for these objects and animals. At once vibrantly joyous and admittedly sad, the subjects’ aura not only becomes visible but begins to erase the physical bodies rendered, transporting us back to the original awe under which they were first discovered.
Erika Lynne Hanson lives in Phoenix, Arizona, but traveled to the arctic to make “Initial Encounters: like meets like, iceberg and glacier”. In the video, the artist symbolically reunites an iceberg (in the form of a flag) with the glacier from which it came; a poetic gesture reconnecting long divided companions. The flag, an emblem of country and conquest, is a material distortion from video footage Hanson captured and abstracted using a computer aided loom. Her attempt to plant the flag into the glacier fails as she is unable to pierce the ice, and must seek a less stable form of support. Alongside the video Hanson will be showing abstract sculptural forms reminiscent of shard minerals and icebergs.
For Hanson and Schmidhofer, landscape is a dynamic subject through which they live, move and exist, but also a medium that is itself in motion from one place or time to another, circulating as a place of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, and a focus for the formation of identity.
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Artist Bios
Erika Lynne Hanson creates weavings, videos, and installations that connect diverse materials, histories, and places. Running through her work is a concern with the idea of landscape; specifically how landscape exists, by definition, as a view or representation—a space or scene that can never be reached physically. Hanson received a MFA from California College of the Arts, and holds a BFA in Fiber from The Kansas City Art Institute. Hanson is a Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Art fellow and has been artist in residence at Real Time and Space in Oakland CA, The Icelandic Textile Center in Blonduos, IS, and The Wrangell Mountain Center in McCarthy, AK. In 2012 she CO-Founded 1522 Saint Louis, an experimental project space in Kansas City. Hanson is currently Assistant Professor of Fibers/Socially Engaged Practices at Arizona State University.
Rachel Schmidhofer was born in Pittsburgh, PA. She received an MFA from Yale University (2011) and a BFA from Washington University (2008). She has had solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY, Novella Gallery, New York, and Glike Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Zurcher Gallery, New York, Gallery Poulsen, Copenhagen, Anna Kustera, New York, and the Torrance Art museum, Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been featured in Modern Painters, the Huffington Post, New American Paintings, and Hyperallergic. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.