Transparent Textiles

By Pernille Anker Kristensen

TRANSPARENT. Transparency is not just a feature in glass art. The textiles designer Jette Hartvig deliberately uses transparency to pique our curiosity with her shawls and decorations.

They are there and then they are not … Transparent patterns in Jette Hartvig’s textiles play around with our gaze – they attract, seduce and disappear. Like a good flirt. Jette Hartvig has always been fascinated with transparency and deliberately utilises its effects to make people look twice. As the shawl ‘Kraka’ made from thin organic fibres from plants that clings to the body as a secretive cloak. Or like the wall decoration for the Danish Ministry of Employment from 2005, where seven flimsy banners challenge the solidity of the end wall.

‘Bringing attention to the room is the absolute potential of the transparent. The transparent textiles dissolve the hard brick wall and make it lighter to a point where you actually feel like walking over to it. It is not so much about pictures and motives as it is about lines going up and the inwards depth. My decoration is an expansion of the wall,’ Jette Hartvig explains and continues; ‘the transparent often catches your attention. You can look into it, and you are naturally inclined to try and find out what is behind it. If you are standing in front of a large beautiful painting, you tend to want to go backwards to get an overview. Lightness and transparency, on the other hand, sucks you in almost. Textiles have three dimensions. That generates depth. The transparency does that you wont be rejected but is always being invited in by the work.’

‘It is not a paradox to work visually with that which you can’t see?

‘Not at all. When you hang something up that you can hardly see, it heightens your senses and awareness about the room. If you split up the room with something transparent, you get two rooms and distances that you didn’t have before. You can compare it with a ray of sunlight shining in through the window into a dusty room. You realise the beams of light and suddenly become aware of your room in a new way. Hammershøi uses that exact same effect in his paintings. It might be that transparency is always naturally downplayed, but it still fills the room and directs your attention to that which would otherwise go unnoticed.’     

 

BOX: About Jette Hartvig

• Born 1964
• Workshop education 1984-1986 with the weavers Anne Marie Egemose and Annette Juel
• Danmarks Designskole, textiles 1986-1991
• Educated in repairing antique oriental carpets by Hans Elmby
• Award winner at Charlottenborg’s Autumn Exhibition 1994. Has exhibited at Sophienholm, Trapholt, Danish Museum of Art & Design – and most recently at the "TID TIL" exhibition in The Round Tower of Copenhagen from April 29 June 5, 2006.
  
  

Pictures & texts:

Jette Hartvig about the decoration in the meeting room of the Danish Ministry of Employment from 2005: ‘I wanted to work with the wall itself, dissolve it and create more layers to bestow depth and softness upon the room.’