The textures of our culture are reflected within the patterns we produce. Sometimes the surface that hosts the pattern is more slippery than imagined, or the pattern appears to have been too unstable in the first place. As the ruler is held exclusively in the hands of humankind, why then is the pattern so tempting and why do we give into it time and time again? Furthermore, as productive mastery is channelled through ever more abstract processes, digital tools and semi-finished particles, don’t we lose touch with the fundamentals of the pattern produced?

In parallel with an array of visual poetry by various handcraft masters dealing with the imaginative fabric of patterns and surface, we speculate upon the phenomenon of the visual pattern as an identifier through the thoughts of Onomatopee’s Freek Lomme. Inspired by the works of various artists who have fascinated him for years now, he wants to re-imagine our capacity to understand the dichotomous life between the pattern as an immanent yet hidden cultural motive, and the pattern as texture; which through transcendence, we can actually reach out for. We only hope he’s chasing something he can hold on to within this spectral subject.

This project concerns the visual poetry that is released within the woven patterns’ ambivalence between fixation by rule and the dynamics of life; on the fracture of materialistic realism and the limits of the power we hold in our hands.

With this endeavour, we take a step back into the mastery of patterns in craft. We will balance this by looking back into the history of ideas involving patterns as visual motives to culture, and dive into our experiences of them.

Contributing artists and designers: Elisa van Joolen, Esther Stocker, Hansje van Halem / Tracy Widdess, Har Sanders, Koen Taselaar, Maria Hedlund, Sigrid Calon, Timon van der Hijden.