Mesh by Fiorella Fasciati
As a designer, Hugo Zumbühl may be considered a late bloomer – however, his interest in textiles and especially weaving has accompanied him for decades. Born and raised in Lucerne, he began his professional career with an apprenticeship as a structural draftsman. He discovered his lifelong passion, weaving, shortly thereafter at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich, where he completed training as a crafts and drawing teacher. After several years of teaching experience in Basel, Zumbühl worked between 1975 and 1981 on a development aid project in Peru, where he was involved in establishing a weaving cooperative. In this role, he researched traditional regional dyeing techniques for wool together with the Peruvian producers. Almost incidentally, he began collecting Peruvian folk art, which has since gained international recognition and is exhibited in renowned museums.
Soon after his return to Switzerland, Zumbühl took a lecturer position at the University of Teacher Education Graubünden (then Bündner Frauenschule) in Chur, where he still teaches crafts and visual arts as part of primary teacher training. Again, it was weaving, more precisely the weaving tradition of the university, that significantly influenced his choice of this position.
In 1998, a meeting took place that would prove crucial for Zumbühl’s further career: at a paper weaving workshop at the Ballenberg course center, he met Peter Birsfelder, a master weaver in the workshops of the Thorberg prison. This encounter with this outstanding craftsman sparked a creative impulse in Zumbühl, from which concrete products soon emerged. With their first joint project, a rug named Oscuro woven from crepe paper and impregnated with natural wax, Zumbühl and Birsfelder won the Design Preis Schweiz in 1999. Inspired by this spontaneous success, the design duo operating under the label TEPPICHartTEAM repeatedly made a name for themselves in the following years with innovative and unconventional rug creations. Since 2001, Zumbühl has been closely connected with Ruckstuhl. The long-term cooperation in sales and material procurement opens up new customer circles as well as creative freedom for TEPPICHartTEAM.
Zumbühl’s studio is located in the converted stable of an old farmhouse in Felsberg near Chur, where he has been based for many years. Serving as both material storage and experimental workshop, it houses the simple loom on which the original patterns of his rug creations are developed through often lengthy trial processes. He fundamentally prefers the simplest binding type, the linen binding, as his primary interest lies in the material and the tactile structure of the fabric. Accordingly, the physical handling of the materials and the structure produced on the loom is of crucial importance to Zumbühl’s work. Constantly searching for unusual (partly new, partly almost forgotten) materials and peculiar material combinations, he uses for his experiments used bicycle inner tubes as well as old felt blankets and coats from the Swiss Army’s stocks or jute coffee sacks. Alongside such recycled materials, he works with hemp and plastic cords, rubber, wire, horsehair, sheep and llama wool, as well as fur strips from goats and sheep. Almost as diverse as these raw materials are the processing techniques he applies to the fabric. Sometimes inspired by archaic cultures, he experiments with painting or embossing; other times he uses a blowtorch or a cat brush. It goes without saying that only a fraction of these experiments result in marketable products.
The starting point for Zumbühl’s contribution to the Edition Ruckstuhl was again a material discovery. The base fabric of the rug Pompon, characterized by a dense, soft pile, consists of so-called chenille yarn, a particularly fluffy wool thread that has almost completely disappeared from the market. Fur tufts knotted in at regular intervals enliven the surface structure and set colorful accents. The image of a moonlit flower meadow at night arises involuntarily.
Variant
Material
pure virgin wool, sheepskin
Technologie
woven, sheepskin pompom knotted in
Galerien & Partner
Edition ansehen oder beziehen
Finden Sie ausgewählte Galerie- und Fachhandelspartner, die mit dieser Art Edition verbunden sind.
Für diese Suche wurde keine passende Galerie gefunden.
