SOFIA HAGSTRÖM MØLLER
SPRING 2020
The Weaving Lab was happy to host Sofia Hagstrom-Moller who traveled from Sweden in the spring of 2020. While researching the Madison area prior to her trip, Hagstrom-Moller became interested in the Swedish immigrants that traveled to America over 100 years ago. These families brought with them both woven textiles and the skills necessary to produce them. While growing up, Hagstrom-Moller was surrounded by women who were talented weavers, including her grandmother Astrid Sofia Stenqvist / Äng from whom she inherited a stack of textiles that she still uses today. Echoing the immigrants of old, Hagstrom-Moller brought one of her grandmother’s woven table-cloths to use as inspiration and as a physical link to a time where the craft of weaving was necessary for a family to get textiles for use in daily life.
LEFT: Sofia with her grandmother, mother and sister. RIGHT: A traditional Daldräll woven pattern.
During her residency, Hagstrom-Moller started by making watercolor paintings and sketching in PointCarre, a program that creates weavable files for UW’s TC-2 loom. Highlighting a common Scandinavian weaving pattern called Daldräll found in her grandmother’s table cloth, her sketches reflect the floral imagery of the pattern but also closely investigate the woven structure used to create these geometric blooms.
Her weavings combine natural floral forms with illustrations of the weaving pattern itself and plays with the scale and dimensionality of both. Whereas hand looms require harnesses to repeat a pattern, a TC2 loom is able to individually manipulate every thread. This ability to render shades and nuances of idiosyncratic imagery allowed Hagstrom-Moller to create a composition where the micro scale of the weaving pattern itself is directly related to the macro scale, and to the visual aesthetics of the pieces.
You can find more about Hagstrom-Moller and her work by following her online: Instagram, Personal Website
