MEMORY DRIP

MEMORY DRIP, 2024 Total installation, variable dimensions TC2-jacquard-woven tapestries produced in collaboration with TextielLab Tilburg, NL. Recycled rocking horses, TC2-woven horse clothing made at the State Workshops for Art, burnt wood, hay, scrub, and withered sunflowers. Courtesy of the artist. The closer you get to the conservatory, the more you are met by the scent of hay and the stable. Olivia Rode Hvass has taken the manor’s elegant conservatory and transformed it into a multi-universe with digitally woven tapestries, abandoned wooden rocking horses, hay, and dried sunflowers. Rode Hvass works with the loom, where digital image-files of the story she has created are translated into patterns and codes that the loom can read. The works and motifs on the tapestries flow into and out of each other, forming a continuous narrative where the main character is the horse. A fissure emerges between an ancient mythological story and our present day. The large and densely woven tapestries draw on a reinterpretation of a renowned tapestry series from the Middle Ages, La Chasse á la licorne, where seven tapestries, made in southern Holland around 1500, depict humanity’s hunt for the magical unicorn through an idealised French landscape. In Rode Hvass’ hands, this beautiful landscape is now unbound and appears abandoned, with scattered hay and dried sunflowers standing and hanging with their heavy heads. Opposite the solitary rocking horses, the narratives in the weavings are displayed, where Rode Hvass follows the hunted unicorn, now present as a horse. The work questions the messages of La Chasse á la licorne - about conquest and power as success - and examines the violence these very messages promote. In the manor’s historical setting, a contrast is created between the rich and the poor, the stable and the parlour, highlighting a culture of division and powerlessness that is prevalent in society today. Embedded in the digitally woven tapestries lies the handiwork as a foundation for contemporary technology: woven into the history of computer technology, since the loom’s punch card system formed the basis for the first computer, is the red thread from the women in the old weaving workshops of the 16th century to the world of technology and globalisation we know today. ... ...At the same time, in Memory Drip, Rode Hvass may also be working to draw myths and mysticism into the present, to reframe the messages and examine them today. To break with the apathy and loneliness in times of crisis, where there is a need for caring communities that struggle in our individualised production society. Huge thanks to; Assistants: Laura Hjort, Tilde Stege, Hannah Keegan, and Kristian Krabbe. Maria and U, for critique and sparring. The Danish Art Workshops for the artist residency. Josefina Eikenaar, Lotte van Dijk, Alonso Muenala Vega, Perry van den Hout, and Ron van de Pol from TextielLab Tilburg for collaboration on the development and production of the large weavings. Thanks for the generous support from Hielmstierne Rosencroneske Foundation, Marie Jacobine Snedker’s Memorial Fund, and the Danish Arts Foundation. And last, but not least, thank you to Rønnebæksholm for all the work involved in setting up an exhibition - especially to Vibeke Kelding-Hansen for curating and for supporting the entire process.