Woven Song is a work about making woven textiles from organ music punch cards. Commissioned by the Zuiderzee Museum in the Netherlands, the project bridges the worlds of two craftsmen, a weaver and an organ maker, who in each case use a system of punched cards to inform the behaviour of a machine, a loom or an organ. Glithero worked alongside life-long weaver Wil van den Broek and master organ maker Leon van Leeuwen to understand the techniques of their crafts and learn if it would be possible to translate one coded art form into the other, to in effect, weave music.
The project forms a self-contained exhibition that presents the material outcomes – fabrics and artefacts, and a two screen video projection that documents the story of the project. On one side that of the organ maker and the other the weaver, who’s stories run concurrently. The dancing hands of the craftsmen form a graceful choreography that echo from one screen to the other, focusing on the uncanny resemblances betweens the crafts and the craftsmen’s stories, at times synchronising, overlapping, diverging, and mirroring.
The use of parallel stories draws attention to common themes, traits, challenges about the preservation of wisdom and heritage. By means of collaboration, Glithero encourage the craftsmen to look upon themselves, their working lives and their legacy from a new vantage point, and by leading them both away from the conventions of their crafts they create new outcomes that are challenging and miraculous. The exhibition not only comprises the final products of this quest, but also the very elements of the quest itself.
Glithero are British designer Tim Simpson and Dutch designer Sarah van Gameren, who met and studied at the Royal College of Art. From their studio in London they create product, furniture, and time-based installations that give birth to unique and wonderful products. The work is presented in a broad spectrum of media, but follows a consistent conceptual path; to capture and present the beauty in the moment things are made.
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