Sia Hurtigkarl. Portræt af Dorte Krogh.
Sia Hurtigkarl in her studio. Photo by Dorte Krogh.
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Sia Hurtigkarl: Travelling with your craft puts you at eye level with other people in a completely different way


Everyone probably knows that many textiles are made by human hands. However, it can be forgotten or it can fade into the background. Even if you’re a designer. Sia Hurtigkarl knows this. Because that’s what she is, a designer, and the kind that specialises in textiles.

‘When you get far enough away from the production, you can forget how many hands are involved in it,’ says the designer. She is sitting on a sack cushion covered by a checked blanket.

We are in her studio in Amager. Out the window, industrial buildings meet the sky, which is blue, and through the window, the sun’s rays hit Sia Hurtigkarl’s neatly arranged material samples and miniature experiments in form.

As she speaks, she lifts the carpet beneath her. The edges are frayed all around.

‘You could imagine if you had a fancy machine to make the fringes on a carpet. But you make them by hand,’ says the designer.

A few years ago, she travelled to India and Nepal to get up close and personal with manufacturers she worked with or might work with in the future. To see human hands working with the yarn that becomes her textiles. To get a sense of how long it takes to ruffle just one fringe, just for example.

Sia Hurtigkarl describes the journey as seminal. It emphasised how important it is as a designer to get out and meet the people you work with. How special the interpersonal encounter can be when it happens over a shared craft.

The designer has a distinct yearning. That’s what we met in the sunny studio to find out more about: What travelling the world as a designer has given her – and what she has brought home with her. Why it’s important to her as a designer with a vision.

Sia Hurtigkarl. Fotograf Dorte Krogh.

Cultural standpoints and longing for the outside world

‘I can get a bit stuck at home,’ says the widely travelled designer. ‘You kind of meet the same people in the field across the board.’

The desire to get out and about has shaped Sia Hurtigkarl’s practice right from the start.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in Man & Identity from the Eindhoven Design Academy. The programme had a very international environment. That was the challenge, but also the reward of studying at that particular academy: early on, she had to learn to communicate her own aesthetic and her design choices.

At the academy, almost a hundred different nationalities were gathered together. That meant: almost a hundred different nationalities with very different starting points for solving the same task.

‘Being in an international school environment made me realise how much we each work from a cultural starting point and our experiences.’

But good taste is not one thing, Sia Hurtigkarl points out. At Eindhoven, nothing could be taken for granted and nothing could be implied. Already during her bachelor’s programme, Sia Hurtigkarl was forced to do what she considers an important part of her practice today.

To put into words why she does what she does.

Several of Sia Hurtigkarl’s projects therefore have a political flavour. Especially her graduation project (World Cup Rugs) from the postgraduate programme she later took at the Royal Danish Academy of Design in Copenhagen.

Prior to Qatar hosting the World Cup in the summer of 2022, a lot of new facilities were built in the country. Mostly by migrant workers.

Among them were many from Nepal. A country with a rich tradition of craftsmanship, especially in textiles. But it is struggling, partly because a large part of the labour force leaves to take work elsewhere. Such as Qatar.

Textiles used to be the country’s biggest export. Today, it’s cheap labour. Sia Hurtigkarl focused on this link between craftsmanship, migration and football in her graduation project, which consisted of three rugs handwoven in Nepal.

Originally, the plan was for her to visit the manufacturer of the rugs as part of the project. But due to the corona pandemic, things were postponed and cancelled.

In a new project, she finally saw the yarn being woven. For what would become her rug.

From product description to productive loss of control

On a self-organised residency, Sia Hurtigkarl finally visited the textile manufacturer she had previously worked with in Nepal. Picturesquely located in Kathmandu among the Himalayan mountains, the factory is, as Sia Hurtigkarl puts it, a place where a ‘hugely caring relationship between the owners and employees’ is evident.

She stayed here for about two weeks. She worked on the project ‘Landscape to Landscape’, interpreting Danish coasts in textile designs to be woven in materials from the mountain landscape surrounding the production. The close relationship with the landscape and those who produce the craft is important to Sia Hurtigkarl.

In the project, she worked to establish a meeting point between a designer’s vision and materials and craft traditions from different geographical locations. She came up with some ideas, but it was also part of the project to let the production conditions shape the collection. For example, together they landed on using some hand-spun yarns.

After her stay in Nepal, she travelled around India with fellow designer Sarah Brunnhuber, who is behind the Copenhagen-based brand Stem.

Together they had a packed programme. They would meet with everyone from textile initiatives to manufacturers and non-profit organisations. They looked at everything from block printing to carpet weaving – and boring warehouses or offices. Because that’s what it’s like travelling with your profession, says Sia Hurtigkarl. ‘Not everything is equally exciting.

But sometimes it all comes together, and Sia Hurtigkarl and her colleague had such a day when they visited a carpet manufacturer outside Jodhpur in India.

The manufacturer weaves dhurri carpets. These are tightly woven carpets, typically in cotton. Dhurri carpets can have very intricate patterns, but can also be more graphic in their expression.

What's so great about such a trip and encounter is that you meet each other at eye level, because you have the craft in common.

The production was housed in a series of clay huts adapted to the climate conditions. They watched the manufacturer weave on different looms and bought some of his rugs. A few of them are now in Sia Hurtigkarl’s studio.

‘Something happens when you get an ‘overload’ of inspiration like I did on that trip,’ says Sia Hurtigkarl. ‘It’s just like a really magical archive that you can pull out in both direct and indirect ways: colour combinations you hadn’t seen before, or methods you didn’t know about. It’s really rewarding as a designer.’

‘For example,’ she says, ’while travelling, I sought out examples of how to weave on a backstrap loom and then sew the panels together.’ She is sitting on one of the examples.

On the carpet there are visible red stitches made with heavy yarn. This recurs in a design series that Sia Hurtigkarl has since developed. It has not yet been published, but is part of an archive from which she can draw ideas for future collaborations.

‘What’s so great about a trip and meeting like this is that you meet each other at eye level because you have the craft in common. That’s what separates it from travelling the world as a tourist. Although, of course, you’re still a bit of a tourist. But you meet because you have a shared knowledge, and between you there is a potential to create new things together.’

‘Also commercially,’ the designer adds. ‘That’s why a manufacturer also has an interest in showing what they can do in terms of craftsmanship.’

At the same time, such a meeting also helps her become a better designer, she says. Namely in communicating her ideas.

‘In a way, you’re more in free fall. There are language barriers that you have to visualise your way out of and cultural references that you can’t use,’ says Sia Hurtigkarl.

Currently, she is interested in basket weaving, which has a strong tradition in Japan. She is interested in the craft because objects are designed using textile techniques. She would like to experience this: The hands weaving with wood fibres.

 

Facts

Sia Hurtigkarl is a designer specialising in textiles. She graduated from the bachelor programme Man and Identity at Design Academy Eindhoven and holds a master’s degree in Design, Object & Furniture from the Royal Academy of Design. As a designer, she works with objects, textiles and installations.

For her graduation project ‘World Cup Rugs’, she received a Danish Design Award in 2022 in the ‘Message Understood’ category. The graduation project consisted of three rugs that problematised the World Cup in Qatar. The project was further developed into a 2.0 version, which was exhibited at the Design Museum and Trapholt and purchased for both museums’ permanent collections.

Alongside her work as a designer in Studio Sia Hurtigkarl, Sia Hurtigkarl teaches at the Royal Academy of Design and helps run the curatorial collective pro tempore.art.

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