A large jacquard tapestry tracks a heavy winter storm that crossed the North Sea in January 2021: the latest iteration of Kadans 2.0 (“cadence” in Dutch), a collaborative project by designers Aliki van der Kruijs and Jos Klarenbeek to capture the movement of water in textile form.
Working with open-source data gathered from buoys deployed by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, van der Kruijs and Klarenbeek generate a 3D model of the sea that maps the waves’ behavior at a particular moment like the North Sea storm. They take a seagull’s eye view of the model and develop it into a weave, where the parameters of the sea’s surface define the contours of the pattern: low, middle, and high water.
Van der Kruijs, who has a background in fashion and applied arts, often has an interest in following the science of natural phenomena to develop tactile materials. After designing a collection of textiles made by precipitation and weather conditions in 2018, she felt a desire to “weave water.” This resonated with Klarenbeek, whose mathematical knowledge, design, and coding skills were newly challenged by the variables of the weaving techniques they began to explore together.
The samples of Kadans 2.0 are the result of the duo’s ongoing series of experiments in weaving. They want to describe the sea’s character through textiles rather than merely executing a stock image of water. They search for methods of showing the changing conditions of one spot in the sea across a woven object, where each meter of the roll or tapestry is different—just like the sea itself.
Utilizing a dozen weaving mechanisms they have developed over the years, the possibilities of ways to fill the spaces between the sea’s parameters seem endless. Van der Kruijs and Klarenbeek make the most of the size, speed, and flexibility of the industrial jacquard loom at the TextielLab in Tilburg, which give the samples stronger dimensionality than ones made in earlier experiments.
The seemingly cold and cerebral working process, derived from the treacherous currents of the North Sea, leads to salutarily warm results. Sunlight touches the crests and valleys of woven structures. Threads of blue yarn ebb and flow depending on the binding schedule. Sensory impressions—both visual and tactile—abound. One wants to be immersed in the shifting pool of patterns, textures, and colors.
With a library of woven sea samples developed since 2019, this recent stage of Kadans 2.0 takes a more autonomous and expressive direction that van der Kruijs and Klarenbeek are keen to develop further as they imagine the potential applications of their ideas and future collaborations. The sea will tell . . .
Harmen Liemburg is a graphic designer, screen printer, and educator based in Wageningen, the Netherlands.
