Maritime waste

Green Garden

The textile artist Joana Schneider creates spatial installations and sculptural environments that present a sustainable contact with organic and recycled materials while shedding light on local creativity and industry. Schneider’s material-based approach pays tribute to labour-intensive techniques and makes craftspeople the central means throughout her oeuvre. Schneider’s playful use of exceptional materials, such as fishing net and rope, merges with her love for textile craft. Techniques such as embroidery, passementerie and tapestry making became her speciality whereby combining these with traditional net-making techniques such as pluis netting and dolly knotting. Being directly taught by local net makers from Katwijk aan Zee her work raises questions about the contemporary value of handicrafts, the future of labour and the diversity of knowledge. Her repetitive and ritualistic creational processes “charge” the object with human attention whereby the sometimes uncanny installations appeal to the viewers’ senses in many respects: visually, tactically and through its natural smell.

Whereas previous creations took their inspiration from the Northern Sea, the work Green Garden is one of Schneider’s first works that explores the aesthetics and culture of the land. Green Garden is inspired by the architecture of the traditional Japanese garden and the zen-like calmness that the plant and stone formations offer. The intuitively created circular organic forms seem to have no beginning nor an end.

Joana Schneider’s work has been shown internationally in exhibitions and fairs such as the PULSE Art Week Miami, Enter Art Fair Copenhagen, Masterly Milano, Sainte Anne Gallery Paris, TextielMuseum Tilburg and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The Amsterdam-based artist is represented by Rademakers Gallery.

Making process

The work has been created in a circular production process with the techniques of gimping (close to coiling) and sewing by hand. After collecting used rope from local Dutch harbours followed by the preparation process of untangling, sorting and cutting the ropes the rope has been further processed through a machine invented by the designer. With a turning device that turns rope 500 times per minute around its own axe, each rope has been wrapped in a combination of organic yarns. With over 3000 stitches carried out by hand, the wrapped ropes were connected to each other.

Text submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank. For information about reproducing (a part of) this text, please contact the maker.