ETN residency at the Textile Centre Haslach
1. - 15. August 2022, Haslach, AT

Report by Christina Leitner and Andreas Selzer

This year, the Textile Centre Haslach, in cooperation with the European textile network ETN, made a call for a 2-week artist-in-residence program for the following three areas:

• Tufting
• Dobby weaving (on handlooms)
• Jacquard weaving (TC1 and electronically controlled industrial loom)

The programme aims to make the infrastructure of the Textile Center Haslach available to people who have the basic technical knowledge to be able to independently advance their own project and want to get involved intensively with their work for 2 weeks.

From numerous submissions, the following artists were selected for the residency:

• Eva-Liisa Kriis from Estonia for dobby weaving
• Julia Rademacker from Germany for jacquard weaving
• Kristina Six from Austria for tufting

The residency started on August 1st, right after the summer symposium Textile Kultur Haslach. The artists shared a three-bedroom apartment in the immediate vicinity of the Textile Center Haslach. After getting to know each other and an update on the technical requirements, we quickly got to work: while Kristina Six was producing a series of tapestries on the subject of "flow" in the tufting studio, Julia Rademaker was researching the possibilities of three-dimensional fabric design and the creation of woven folds on the jacquard weaving machine. Eva-Liisa, on the other hand, dealt intensively with the most diverse types of dobby looms. Among other things, she managed to get a retired 22 shaft ARM loom which formerly belonged to Austrian weaver Susanne Heindl up and running again. This brilliant Austrian weaver originally founded the Textile Kultur Haslach initiative together with her husband Bernhard Heindl over 30 years ago. After the dissolution of her workshop, she bequeathed most of her equipment and materials to the Textile Centre Haslach, where they are now available in separate weaving studio to artists who want to delve deeper into dobby weaving.

It was nice to see how the 3 artists got immersed deeper and deeper in their projects, supported each other and grew together as a group in a very short time. The relative seclusion of Haslach, the beauty of the surrounding nature and refreshing swim breaks in the river pool offered ideal conditions for productive work.

On August 12, towards the end of the stay, a final presentation of the results took place, to which friends of the Textile Centre Haslach were invited. The workshops were visited and there was keen interest in the works and the different approaches of the artists.

We thank Eva-Liisa, Kristina and Julia for the wonderful time and look forward to further exchange!

More information about the artists

Kristina Elisabeth Six, born in Wolfsberg in Carinthia in 1988, grew up in Upper Styria, studied textile design and art education at the University of Art and Design Linz. She is a freelance textile artist in her studio sixerie, is involved in various art and costume projects and teaches in Graz.

Textiles in all their facets hold a special charm for Kristina. Working with and researching different materials and techniques are her passion. This can be seen in her professional commitments, for example at the Bregenz Festival, at the Komische Oper Berlin, Oper Graz and in her teaching at schools, where she constantly moves between art, design and crafts.
Since October 2021, Kristina has been working freelance in her textile studio sixerie in Graz, where she creates her own designs using tufting. She is fascinated by the tension between idea, design, the translation process into a three-dimensional textile landscape and the appearance at the end of the manufacturing process. Playing with different pile heights and thus levels, the variation of cut and loop pile, shaving and cutting hold for Kristina an inexhaustible design repertoire with a wide range of effects that needs to be constantly explored.

Julia Rademacker is a textile designer, currently based in Germany. She graduated in Crossmedia Design at ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL) and continued her education with a Master's degree in Conceptual Textile Design at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle (DE).

In her work she focuses on textiles and spaces in virtual and physical spheres with a deeper interest on their intersections and current social references. A major part of her exploration relates to the digitalization and virtualization of textiles, which includes, for example, a reflection on textile representations in virtual spaces and its hyperreal aesthetics.

Her work can be seen as a constant interplay between analog and digital which underlines the hybridity and the acceptance of both worlds as coexisting rather than binary components. Her experimental approach allows her to explore multiple perspectives of contemporary textile design in both artistic and playful ways.

Eva-Liisa Kriis received her Diploma in textile education in 2001 at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has worked as a designer and interior designer. She has also been working as a trainer at the IIDA Craft School, which she founded in 2010. In 2016, she established a private museum of looms at the IIDA Craft School and has collected various draw-, dobby- and jacquard looms. The looms are mainly connected to Estonia, but there are also ones from Germany, Sweden, Finland, the United States and Latvia. In June 2022, Eva-Liisa defended her master's thesis "Introduction of Dobby looms and Draw Looms in Estonia at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century".

Eva-Liisas main interest is the study of textile technologies. Weaving education today does not allow you to acquire everything that was known 100-200 years ago. The ability to cope with different looms has decreased. Knowledge of the use of looms with different pattern cards has disappeared in Estonia due to the long period of occupation and modernization. It is only today that lost stories and looms begin to emerge and knowledge of past skills has slowly started to grow. The IIDA weaving museum founded by Eva-Liisa is unique in both Scandinavia and the Baltics. She collects looms with wooden constructions for hand-weaving in the museum, using them in trainings she has organized herself. Eva-Liisa has published the book "Threads Through Time: Estonian Ethnic Weaving Patterns" and four different educational films on DVD. In her master's thesis, she continues to describe the history of the development of looms and techniques. From the end of the 19th century, the organizers of weaving courses in Estonia were major influences there.