Sensuous contrasts
- Marianne works with knits and textiles as an artist, craftswoman and teacher
- She often upcycles discarded materials and leftover textiles
- She embraces both the beautiful and the painful sides of life
Marianne Johnstad-Møller is a textile artist with a strong focus on materials, craft, tradition and innovation. She uses colourful threads, yarn, discarded leftovers and plaster to create unique pieces. Her work is inspired by contrasts like the transition between light and darkness, also between what is hidden for the eye but felt in the deeper layers. She hand-dyes all her knitted pieces and loves to immerse herself in an experimenting dialogue with materials, colours and technique. She reworks discarded and damaged pieces of knitting from other projects, creating new and often transparent art pieces. Her background in theatre – creating costumes – flows like a poetic thread through her interpretations of minor theatrical personalities.
INTERVIEW
My grandmother introduced me to crocheting. She also embroidered covers and decorations for their furniture. My great grandmother was a phenomenal seamstress, and one of my aunts taught me to lace. My other grandmother showed me how to knit, so my whole family was into textile work.
Textiles comes in endless variations with many different properties and on a range of scales. Yarn is luscious and we are familiar with it because we wear fabric every day. Textile is excellent at expressing atmospheres, and I can create a piece almost out of nothing.
Knitting on a manual machine is an intuitive process that I can alter as I go along. The process from idea to the final result is direct, so I can change my course at any time. That is important to me as I rarely define my pieces beforehand.
It is a mix of wanting to explore a subject or a challenge or a thought, I also like to explore emotions. I look at former projects as they often sow a seed for a new idea. It is a continuous loop of exploration of shapes, surfaces and expressions. I combine existing knitted pieces and threads in different colours and structures.
