Hannah Ryggen's home is Trondheim, Norway. I saw the beautiful collection of her textile works at the local design museum, the Kuntsmuseum.. My Norwegian friend in Oslo from the Ibsen world recommended it to me. The trip evolved as I was on pilgrimage to NIDAROS, the great cathedral which is a World Heritage site, built by the first Viking King Olaf, who converted to Christianity, and is now honored as a sait. I stayed in its Pilgrim Guest House. Built by the first Viking to convert to Christianity
The trip to Trondheim introduced me to an textile artist who has been in the Venice Bienelle and in Documenta and at the Kunshalle in Frankfurt, and will be at Bampfa in 2020-21 curated by former Director and Senior Curator Lawrence Rinder. We discussed her work in a Curator's Circle talk this summer. Larry had been prompted by a member poet, Bob Gluck, who had lived in Norway for a couple of years to look at Ryggen's master works, because they are so valued in Norway and Europe. I was able to obtain the only book in the bookstore at Bampfa before it closed, which is published by Prestel and is a beautiful collection exhibited at the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. I also had bought the catalogue at the museum in Trondheim, Hannah Ryggen Triennale 2016 "We Live upon a Star".
An excerpt from the dialogue in "An Accidental Modernist" Ingar Dragset in Conversation with Esther Schlicht.
ES Ryggen's major tapestry "We are Living on a Star" has been installed in the Highrise in the Government Quarter in Oslo ever since its creation in 1958 but it was damaged in the terrorist bombing by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011. The work has been repaired but the damage is still visible. How do you read this scar or wound?
ID Of course Ryggen would have been absolutely appalled by the view of Breivik, as we all are. But she was also someone who didn't seem to brush uncomfortable truths lightly. The scars in "We are Living on a Star" will never heal, just as the scars that Breivik has inflicted upon the world won't heal, and they shouldn't. We need to remember what is able to hurt us, what lies dormant in our midst. "
This tapestry, Hannah Ryggen said, is to remind us that "love and compassion" are important for government officials. Ryggen lived through the Nazi occupation of Norway.
Ryggen raised the sheep on their farm, for the wool, and grew the flax, for the linen. She spun and dyed her own threads, from gathering lichen and bark for dyes. Hannah, in her education, started as a painter, studying at Lund University. She felt the warp and woof of weaving offered an implicit grid to structure her images, in a middle ground between schematic abstraction and narrative figuration. Like a painter, she wove directly from her imagination to the textile canvas. She did no preliminary drawings but wove as she wanted, using a direct method. She hung the tapestries on her clothes line. Hannah Ryggen was weaving art, not practicing the art of weaving, alone.
Poetry and Painting united in Ryggen's weaving. In 1952, she based a work on a verse from T.S. Eliot'"Little Gidding", the last of four poems in Four Quartets. She explores a theme common to some weavings, that of the power of love in both physical and political sense. At the base of the tapestry, she wove in a Norwegian translation of these lines from Eliot's poem: "Who then devised the torment? Love. / Love is the unfamiliar Name/ Behind the hands that wove/The Intolerable shirt of flame/Which human power cannot remove./ We only live, only suspire. Consumed by either fire or fire."
I will leave it there , as too many are being consumed by the wildfires raging now in California. The smoke is in the air.
