Sue Malvern and her textile residency in Iceland
- Seven Sisters Handweavers
- Jan 31
- 2 min read
Sue has recently returned from a month long residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre, Textilmidstod. She was researching the migration of weaving traditions across cultures, and the specificity of Icelandic weaving.
Textilmidstod is located in Blönduós, in the North West Iceland, housed in a former women’s college, the Kvennaskólinn. The Centre combines the textile studio and weaving loft housing one hundred year old countermarch looms in the old building of the former college, alongside a cutting edge digital textile laboratory including two TC2 looms and digital technologies for felting, embroidery and other textile arts.
Sue worked both on Icelandic countermarch looms and on the TC2, swapping between traditional and state of the art digital loom technology, sometimes on the same day! She developed experimental approaches to traditional Icelandic weaving patterns including a form of extra weft patterning called Glit which is only found in Iceland, and monksbelt, widely practised in Nordic countries and in the UK, but called salún in Iceland. Sue was weaving with wool, including weaving a table runner incorporating the first spinning efforts of one of her colleagues. She used her own first steps in digital jacquard weaving to explore the forms of Icelandic glaciers, currently threatened by climate change. Sue’s co-residents in October 2024 included textile artists from the States, Brazil, Taiwan, Germany, Siberia and Denmark. Together, they held a pop-exhibition ‘From there to here and back again’ of their work in progress, with many visitors from the local community.
Sue is collaborating with her colleague in Germany, who used her residency to research the culture of wool in Iceland. Together they are working on producing a zine - ‘The Icelandic textile universe. A handbook for textile-tourists.’ Sue is currently developing new works using wool that explore innovative ways of weaving salún/monksbelt.
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