Creative Practitioner
Statement
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Contact:
. @sanna_claesson .
. sanna.claesson@gmail.com .
. www.linkedin.com/in/sanna-claesson .
My work is driven by the learning of crafts, tactility and seeking interesting combinations of vulnerable, delicate and raw materials against the durable, layered and protective. As a designer and maker specializing in knitwear, I am driven by longevity and the relational depth between the garment and wearer. Through this lens, garments are vessels of memories and stories, by which the maker and the wearers themselves are passed down.
The movement, intricacy and layering of my work are all inspired by nature, with its vastness, unpredictability, harsh truths and beauty. With a focus on textural materiality, I am interested in how knitting provides options for deep exploration of technique, offering extreme contrasts between delicate details and absurd rawness. I explore the lifecycle processes from fibre to yarn to textile to worn, of loved and mended garments. Questioning every step, every presumption of traditional ways of making, pushing my research deeper into the history and craft of knitting and textile arts, a field often devalued. I seek to help change the perception of this artform, to make more people see the value of these traditional centuries’ old techniques, how they manage to encapsulate the presence of community and collaboration, and the investment that is needed to keep them alive.
I aim to create wearable living pieces of art and history, pieces that last through time. Simultaneously, I explore advancements in knitting machinery, utilizing this human-made technology, that offer possibilities far beyond making with the human hand. The combination of technology with unapologetic natural fibres and dyes, serve to maximize the best of both worlds, creating beautiful lasting garments for an envisioned future completely circular as life itself. Recently I explored spinning my own yarn by hand, balancing hand and tool techniques where tiny changes in hand movements and angle of the fibres affect the structure of the yarn making them unconventional and creating a rich pattern when knitted together.
Other themes of my work consider contrasts - light and dark, dependence and neglect and the realities of a being part of a species driven by greed, lust and idleness. A lot of my pieces juxtapose the atmospheric, dark and sombre with illumination, action and rebellion to induce/prompt alternative lifestyles and systems that prove/initiate our free will to create the future we demand and that not only speak the overused word of sustainability but live it. The future I relentlessly work to achieve is one dedicated by communal collaboration and making for small scale of the highest quality where one is the master of eveery step of the process.
//Sanna Claesson
The movement, intricacy and layering of my work are all inspired by nature, with its vastness, unpredictability, harsh truths and beauty. With a focus on textural materiality, I am interested in how knitting provides options for deep exploration of technique, offering extreme contrasts between delicate details and absurd rawness. I explore the lifecycle processes from fibre to yarn to textile to worn, of loved and mended garments. Questioning every step, every presumption of traditional ways of making, pushing my research deeper into the history and craft of knitting and textile arts, a field often devalued. I seek to help change the perception of this artform, to make more people see the value of these traditional centuries’ old techniques, how they manage to encapsulate the presence of community and collaboration, and the investment that is needed to keep them alive.
I aim to create wearable living pieces of art and history, pieces that last through time. Simultaneously, I explore advancements in knitting machinery, utilizing this human-made technology, that offer possibilities far beyond making with the human hand. The combination of technology with unapologetic natural fibres and dyes, serve to maximize the best of both worlds, creating beautiful lasting garments for an envisioned future completely circular as life itself. Recently I explored spinning my own yarn by hand, balancing hand and tool techniques where tiny changes in hand movements and angle of the fibres affect the structure of the yarn making them unconventional and creating a rich pattern when knitted together.
Other themes of my work consider contrasts - light and dark, dependence and neglect and the realities of a being part of a species driven by greed, lust and idleness. A lot of my pieces juxtapose the atmospheric, dark and sombre with illumination, action and rebellion to induce/prompt alternative lifestyles and systems that prove/initiate our free will to create the future we demand and that not only speak the overused word of sustainability but live it. The future I relentlessly work to achieve is one dedicated by communal collaboration and making for small scale of the highest quality where one is the master of eveery step of the process.
//Sanna Claesson