Meters relative to sealevel
1500 1250 1000 750 500 250 150 100 50 35 25 20 15 10 5 -5
CHRISTIEN MEINDERTSMA
UTRECHT, THE NETHERLANDS (1980)
Christien Meindertsma’s aim is to find the authentic, almost pre-industrial relation between product and consumer. In her work, she seeks to clarify the production process. In The Flax Project she shows how flax seed is sown in a Flevoland polder in the Netherlands, how the flax fibre is spun into yarn, and the yarn woven, braided and twined to make rope.
THE FLAX PROJECT
Industrial production processes and globalization mean that people are often no longer aware of the provenance of everyday products. Meindertsma wants to make the origins and the production process transparent. This is well illustrated in One Sheep Sweater, her graduation project at Eindhoven Design Academy in 2003. The wool used for each sweater came from just one merino sheep. Depending on the size of the sheep and the amount of wool, a sweater will be either large or very small. All have subtle differences in colour. Meindertsma makes the most of these irregularities and specific characteristics in her designs and deliberately avoids rectifying them. This work questions present-day society, which would seem to produce identical products with no individual character or features.
www.christienmeindertsma.com
The contemporary processing of raw materials is once more uncovered in Meindertsma’s work Pig 05049 (2007). She spent three years researching the processing of pig 05049 and took photos of the astonishing products made from its parts. Again, clarity and transparency are prominent factors in the work, aided by the 1:1 rendering of the finished products in the resulting book of photographs. The project won the prestigious Index Award in 2009. Meindertsma’s approach is based primarily on raw pure materials. For the Flax Project she examined the specific qualities of flax. It was once one of the most important fibres for textile production in the Netherlands. Today it is still grown in small quantities and exported mainly to China. Meindertsma used Dutch flax, spun into yarn, and then woven, braided, twined and knotted at Steenbergen rope-makers in Gorssel. The rope-making craft has a long tradition in the Netherlands. Meindertsma made fourteen products from the rope, including a hassock and a lamp.
43
2009-2013 Installation with video / film: Roel van Toer On loan from the artist