The Rough and the Smooth

Two earlier pieces in the show, Textile Labour and Rana Plaza—The Collapse, are based on internet images: one of a young worker laboring in a Turkish sweatshop, and the other of the ruins of the textile factory in Bangladesh whose collapse in 2013 killed 1,134 people. The knots  on the “smooth” sides resemble the pixels of the original computer image; the reverse sides present near-abstract images of violence—the downward-hanging yarn becoming, in the artist’s view, something like tears.

With Maxim, Röndahl turned toward her own life, and the show offers rya portraits of her children, friends, her mother—and pop-culture heroines too, including rather hard-to-interpret shaggy images of Marge Simpson and Barbamama, a nurturing mother figure in a French children’s book series. 

The shift to the familiar doesn’t exclude sadness, pain, and the travails of the body, however; in one of the sections of commentary posted with the show, Röndahl alludes to what she calls “the tragicomic everyday.” In a self-portrait, the shaggy side—the only side the artist’s installation allows us to see—presents a jagged smear of red on her nose, in an allusion to the asthmatic symptoms that afflict her when she’s at the loom. 

And, commentary informs us, Maxim the dog died during the making of his portrait. “When I first showed the children the finished weaving, they walked around it, jumped and sat on it—like they were getting to be with our dog again,” the artist writes. “In a way this weaving can be seen as a way to deal with the grief.”

In each case, the unruly, ungraspable aspects of things we think we understand are literally woven into the fabric of these images of life.