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Frisian Wouw by Claudy Jongstra

2010 · Edition of 1

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Dutch textile artist Claudy Jongstra is her convincing contemporary and modern interpretation of felt, a material that is millennia old but often perceived by many as old-fashioned or backward. It was for this reason that she received the significant and highly endowed Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prize for applied art and architecture in her homeland in 2008. Jongstra’s engagement with felt, which soon became her life’s theme, began in 1994 when she saw a traditional Mongolian felt yurt at the Dutch Textile Museum in Tilburg. At that time, she was already well established in the textile world. She had studied fashion design at the art academy in Utrecht, then tried to establish her own clothing label, and finally worked for several years as an employed designer for a larger fashion company. For the designer disillusioned by the fashion world, the encounter with felt was like a revelation. Deeply impressed by the structure and colorfulness of the seemingly simple material, she decided to explore its creative potential more closely.

In evening courses, she learned to make felt herself from sheep’s wool, water, and soap through friction. Soon she began experimenting with the material, initially without a concrete goal in mind. Experts from the Dutch Textile Museum, to whom she showed samples, encouraged her to continue her work and motivated her to make further efforts. To enhance the expressive possibilities of her felts, she subsequently engaged with old, nature-based dyeing techniques on the one hand, and on the other hand integrated raw materials such as alpaca, cashmere, linen, silk, cotton, and occasionally synthetic fibers into her works. From very modest beginnings, a flourishing workshop developed over the years, whose productions oscillating between art and design have now gained international attention. First, textile galleries in London showed interest in her handmade felt unique pieces, followed by fashion designers and costume designers after initial skepticism towards the material. Most recently, Jongstra’s works have attracted the attention of interior designers and architects, with whom she has been able to realize a growing number of projects in recent years. The list of her cooperation partners is impressive.

It includes fashion creators such as John Galliano, Donna Karan, Christian Lacroix, and Alexander van Slobbe, as well as important representatives of contemporary architecture in the Netherlands: Claus & Kaan, Jo Coenen, OMA, and MVRDV.

Jongstra’s sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract felt pictures have also found their way into the collections of significant art and design museums, such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the MoMA in New York.

The uniqueness of the “Studio Claudy Jongstra,” which has been based for about ten years in a small village in the Dutch province of Friesland and now employs eight women, is not only due to the aesthetic and artistic quality of its products. For Jongstra herself, ecology and sustainability are central aspects of her work. For example, the sheep’s wool she processes largely comes from her own flock of around 200 animals. They belong to the Drenthe Heath sheep breed, which has long been common in Holland but is now rare, and by grazing mainly on dikes, they contribute incidentally to natural landscape protection. The exclusive use of natural dyes in the studio’s own dyeing facility is also part of this context. With the money from the Prins Bernhard Prize, Jongstra established a display and experimental garden last year dedicated to cultivating old dye plants.

The felt rug Frisian Wouw, which Claudy Jongstra designed as part of the Edition Ruckstuhl, stands out above all for its irregular outline and its wildly moving texture. This can be understood as a reference to the archaic character of felt. The yellow coloration, which gives the rug an extraordinarily warm and homely radiance, not coincidentally evokes associations with the golden age of Dutch painting, when masters like Rembrandt used the dye from the plant Reseda (also called dyer’s woad).

Variant

Material

Felt made from pure virgin wool

Technologie

Felted, dyed with natural colors

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