“Here, Now” is a major wall piece by the Norwegian fiber artist Gjertrud Hals. For this poetic work, which was exhibited for the first time at Design Miami/Basel, Gjertrud Hals has used many different textile techniques like knitting, crotchet, embroidery and macramé knots. Some of the broidery fragments she made myself, while others are her grand mothers or “ready-mades” from different cultures and periods. The different fragments are woven together in a frame and finally sprayed with paper pulp, forming what the artist calls a “web”, a current theme in Hals’ work. The dark shadows on the wall are as important as the actual work itself, and they are even perceived before the delicate immaterial web.
Hals’ work deals with traces of a life, time passing and a changing existence and the illusion of being able to hold on for a moment – to a here, now. Hals seeks to make connections between history and the present, between different cultures and between culture and nature. The “web” is a rather concrete reflection on human endeavor, touching and impressive at the same time. It deals with modern man’s place in nature, where organic structures link up with human forms. People live their lives between chaos and cosmos. Where forces of nature and war create chaos, a new order develops, but always different from how it was before the forces moved in. Surroundings are in a constant change while human ideas persist.
Gjertrud Hals is one of the redefining figures of textile art, liberating fibre from the loom and displaying it in space as three-dimensional sculpture. Hals’ upbringing on the little island of Finnøya is profoundly anchored in her art and her relationship to the region’s nature and culture is deep and complex. Hals’ works seem to possess their own laws and logics, moving somewhere between delicate neatness and unrestrained inspiration. In the words of the artist, they propose a reflection “…on the relationship between nature and culture, in which the lives of modern humans are moving between chaos and order. Forces of nature and war create chaos, after which a new order is elaborated, always both the same and a little bit different than the previous.“ Gjertrud Hals focuses on natural fibres that she transforms through various techniques including weaving, knitting, casting, spraying and cutting. Trained in the art of tapestry weaving in the 1970’s, Hals’ interest in feminism and women’s culture associates her with the new wave of women artists exploring the sculptural potential of textile. Hals’ works have been acquired by private and public collections, such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway; The Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, USA; The Museum of Decorative Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland; Mobilier National / Les Gobelins, Paris, France and the Bellerive Museum, Zürich, Switzerland.