Contemporary Patterns
Stage curtain, The National Public Art Council Sweden
Aircraft Museum Linköping 2010


 
    Jacquard woven cotton 650 x 1400cm Machineweft made at The Textimuseum in Tilburg, Nederland  
 
The demonstrations on Tiananmen Square, the
release of Nelson Mandela and the burning Twin
Towers are brought together in Contemporary Pattern,
a drapery for the auditorium of the Swedish Air Force
Museum in Linköping.
The woven curtain offers a fragmented panorama over
the last decades of news flow. We meet the men and
women of world politics as well as ordinary people,
such as the East German border guard whose leap
over the barbed wire to the West in the early 60's was
captured by an attentive photographer.
Today, most of us can identify the pictures, but the
passage of time is relentless and it will not be long
before some of them have been forgotten.
But at the same time that the world's elements are
more closely connected to each other contexts
become increasingly complex and difficult to review.
Loyalties, hostility and threats in international politics
and economy follow new and less stable patterns
today than during the Cold War era.
Here the geometric parts of the curtain which
interleave the reproduced photographs are of
particular importance. The regularly structured
patterns allow them to be interpreted as a metaphor
for how we organize and sort information, and -
perhaps vainly – how we strive to create
understandable context.
Contemporary Patterns allows past and present to
merge in a broad and embracing snapshot that by
future viewers surely may be perceived as both typical
of its time and elusive.
 
Love Jönsson
 
 

 

 

 

World events are in the drapery connected to local.
The dark streak that flows through the composition
draws its shape from the nearby river Svartån, seen
from above. The images and the abstract-patterned
fields invoke correspondingly an aerial photographer’s
representation of the landscape, with sharply drawn
fields and forest areas laid out like a patchwork quilt.
An insert picture of workers on their way out from the
Saab factory in Linköping strengthens the link to the local community.
This combination of the global and local reflects
today's world, geographically distant events are close
to us, as they often have an impact on our economy
and jobs.

Work in progress Assistants Karin Gustavsson and Charlotte Svinevit
Project Manager: Martin West/The National Public Art Council Sweden
www.statenskonstrad.se
www.flygvapenmuseum.se