Lise Frølund

Know the Weaver # 4 October-November 2014

Lise Frølund

Independent Artist and TC1 Owner

WEBSITE: www.lisefrolund.dk

I will start with how Lise Frølund always inspires and challenges her surroundings - both as a textile artist, as an explorer/inventor and as a friend! Lise’s capacity to continuously explore new materials and expressions is amazing! She has won prizes and done big commissions.

She has used a wide range of fibers and materials including paper and conductive materials. She has collaborated with a composer to visualize sound etc. Over the years, she has regularly sent me photos of recent works, commissions, installations and links to reviews and press! This has been priceless for Digital Weaving Norway: We could show how textile artists made success with our equipment!

- Vibeke Vestby 1. What sparked off your interest in Weaving? Also, is weaving something that fulfills your everyday artistic pursuit or is there a long-term goal that you wish to achieve through this process/journey?

The combination of the inherent limitations of the handloom and the many possibilities that nonetheless open up when you start working. The more I weave, the more I become aware of new possibilities in structure as well as in materials. This is an ongoing process, which I still find

extremely interesting. It will keep me busy for years to come.

What also appeals to me is that you can work in large-sized units, and that any woven material is naturally 3D. The fabric is in reality a relief, which can appear very different according to where you view it from.

2. Over the years, you've worked on a number of commissions and shows - is there a particular one that is the closest to your heart and if yes, why?

Allowing for the great many years that I have been weaving, must I come up with only one?

Immediately, three come to mind– two exhibitions and one commission.

The exhibition “TECHNOLOGICAL MATERIALS” opened in 2001. The TC-1, which I had had access to since 1998, was set up with all the new thread materials. Luminous threads, threads with light memory, reflective and iridescent threads, threads that crimped when washed, shrunk or disappeared completely, thick, thin, transparent, glossy, metal threads, synthetic threads, and natural threads. Whatever we could lay our hands on was set up and combined in strange weavings. The result was many different fabrics and cloths, which a fashion designer cut out and tailored into articles of clothing. This process lasted a whole year.

The exhibition, “LULLALOOM” opened in 2007 as the result of a collaboration that had started a couple of years before that. A musician that I know and I were both a bit frustrated by our respective artistic expressions. I felt that weaving tended to be somewhat clumsy and oldfashioned, whereas the musician felt that digital music could be a bit flimsy – it lacked ‘body' so to speak. So that is where we began: Could music be endowed with some sort of physical form, and could weaving be made to sing?

After quite a few abortive ideas, we ended up with a dogmatic translation from one

medium to the other. Not until we had nearly finished did we realize what we were really on to, i.e. my weaving files could be played as sound, and the music files could be woven into fabrics. Easy, plain sailing, apparently, but we just had to grasp the full extent of the idea ourselves, and then find a right-minded ITengineer who would devise a program that could adapt the files to the respective recorders.

In this way, a lullaby - composed and recorded by the musician - resulted in 27 meters of baby blanket woven on my loom. Interwoven in the fabric were also thin woolen threads containing 7 % steel fibre. These were placed with a density which prevented cell phone signals from passing through.

As part of the exhibition was also a questionnaire asking which of the two baby blankets you would buy, one with steel and protection or the other with pure wool - design, treatment and price the same. It´s not difficult to guess which one the grandmother and which the young aunt did chose, but it was still surprising how predictable was the answer.

Another sound file resulted in loose threads that were far too long. I tied them down by superimposing a traditional weaving. The new file was then woven into a piece of silk fabric and subsequently played as sound.

In 1999, Lise and some Danish colleagues came to see the TC-1s exhibited at ITMA in Paris! Before the end of that year, Lise had succeeded in buying a TC-1 loom to Denmark through setting up a joint ownership with the Design School in Kolding and some private investors. Soon, one loom was not enough, so she also has a TC-1 loom her own.

Colleague and neighbour Grethe Sørensen has another one, and with the TC-1 loom at the Design School, they have created a pool of modules that can be combined in one loom for special projects!

Finally, the wall-hanging “A BOY’S DREAM” woven in 2010 for Tronrud Engineering’s new administration and factory building. When I visited Tronrud Engineering for the first time in 1998, I remember being duly impressed by a helicopter being parked on a rock just outside the window. Later, the firm moved to a location which in my eyes was far out in the Norwegian woods, but which to them was right in the middle of the local community in which they are deeply rooted. As it is also a firm founded on one single man’s ideas, with a world wide web of business relations, well, then I soon came up with the idea: castles in the air. This is also a reference to the keen interest the firm takes in aviation. The motif eventually materialized as a bird’s eye view of a complex of buildings only vaguely visible in the middle of a big forest. The materials are thick, glossy woolen yarns from Norway, flax from Sweden, and polyester yarns from Denmark. All good yarns which will be readily appreciated by weaving connoisseurs in this part of the world.

Fortunately, “A BOY’S DREAM” was to be a large wall-hanging. In this connection, the flexibility of the TC-1 came in handy. As many TC- 1 elements can be installed one behind the other, they can also be put next to one another in a row. The width of the carpet loom in my workshop is 3.5 meters. An iron frame was suspended from the ceiling and fastened to the top of the side pieces of the loom. On this frame the eight TC-1 elements were installed, the one next to the other, which gave ample weaving width for the 2.6 meter high wall-hanging.

The length of a weaving – in this case 6.4 meters – is not a problem. We were quite convinced that this solution with the TC-1 elements was used for the first time in “the history of weaving”.

During the actual weaving, my colleague and I stood throwing the shuttles to one another.

When I look back on these projects with satisfaction and pleasure, it is because they all entailed a big amount of collaboration where all participants were deeply engaged in the process. After the initial ideas followed the long interplay of thoughts, trials, experiments, new ideas, new investigations etc. Many artists have availed themselves of the new technologies to achieve fine, regular and perfect results, whereas I have used a different set of heddles with bigger holes to accommodate coarser materials. For my latest weavings, I have chosen broad paper lamellas as weft. With this rather unusual material and the underlying systematics of the loom, I can create surfaces that may appear as a chaotic hurly-burly, but which nonetheless bring forth the motif intended.

When Tronrud Engineering built our new administration building in 2010/11, it was with great joy that we could commission a big textile from Lise! The textile was almost 3 meters by 6 meters (~10 x 20 feet) – woven in one piece!!! The weave structures are amalgamated with the motif, and became a unique art piece named Boy’s Dream!