Rosa Tolnov Clausen
Om Rosa Tolnov Clausen
Hand weaving, community and care of self
My creative practice oscillates between the fields of craft and design. I create physical spaces about the practice of hand-weaving, using the craft as a catalyst for physical, social and creative interaction, and a pause in the contemporary urban everyday. I challenge notions about hand-weaving as a time- and space-consuming craft requiring high technical skill.
Around the world, we find millennia-old traditions in hand-weaving that have been developed and refined over time. My PhD research seeks to understand why today we should continue weaving, when the production of textiles as use objects is achieved both faster and more cheaply by the industry.
In projects like Weaving Kiosk (2017) in the Nordic countries, and other explorations such as Export/import (2018) in Japan, or Groundwork (2016) in South Korea, my observation has been that interest for hand weaving exists still today, once the craft is opened in a processually, spatially and temporally accessible way, and that it has positive effect on the people who weave.
My PhD research project is about imagining, speculating and constructing how, by whom and for what purpose hand weaving can matter as it can be performed in the Nordic region today. Through a bricolage of research methods drawn on from sociology, ethnology and speculative and constructive design research, I aim to challenge practically the image of hand weaving as we believe to know it, and explore what effects and potentials it can contain in liquid-modern society.
I hold a Master of Arts in Textile Design (Kolding School of Design, Denmark, 2013). Since my graduation I have created textile projects based in hand weaving with strong social components, for example the co-design project H.O.W. with the weavers at Blindes Arbejde (Work by the Blind) in Denmark and the participatory installations at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul; and Fuori Salone, Milan. Since 2018 I am teaching at HDK in Design and Craft on the BA and MA levels.
Keywords: hand weaving, community, society, time, skill, care, textiles