Mr. Maarten Kolk

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For the Audax Textielmuseum Tilburg we’ve tried to design our fascination for water. Textile and water do not seem to have too much in common, but they are indissolubly connected by the industry. The textile industry is one of the biggest polluters of water in the world. For this reason we didn’t just portray water, but we developed production methods that spare the water as much as possible. We experimented with digital printing on textile, different type of unbleached and uncoated yarns, and all kind of weaves. We tried to enlarge the surface of the prints by adding very little water to the production process. This water was fully absorbed by the farbric, so no water was wasted. The combination of material, weave and way of adding water to the process resulted in unique effects on the textile.
As prints we used photographs of water. To shoot these photographs we went to Iceland, the country where durability and water go hand in hand. With its glaciers, geothermal spas, geysers, rivers, waterfalls, fjords, oceans and lakes this turned out to be the perfect location to document our starting point.
The research has resulted in a series of textiles. The table cloth, grand foulard, tea towels, autonomous objects and rug all carry the general name “Waterloop” (Flow of water).

Watercolors
Tea towels
During the period of working at the Textile Lab in Tilburg we developed a technique to fully dye textile by using a photographical image. The production method dyes the yarns in the colors of the photograph specific by millimeters. With this technique we developed the tea towels Watercolors. The blanc towel can be printed in nine different designs consisting of a blurred picture of water with a checked pattern on it. The names of the nine locations where the color of the water was photographed are woven into the textile. The name of the location that matches the specific print of the color is accentuated by the checked design.

Skills