Gunilla “Nillan” Holmgren is a colourist and a visual artist who uses both painting and tapestry weaving as her medium. She gets her ideas from nature, the sea and the sky. Observing the shift in colours from light to dark, all year around, Holmgren finds inspiration for her unique colour palette.

Before she starts weaving, she first paints a sketch in tempera. Then she hand-dyes wool and linen yarns in a pot, producing many different colours. In the weaving process, Holmgren mixes many hundreds of nuances in a single weave, using up to five colours in each yarn thread, changing the colours often so as to achieve the rich and variegated expression she strives for. In this way Holmgren manages to capture the abstract and shifting light in nature.

Portrait photographer: Bengt-Arne Ignell
Art photographers: Jenny Thörnberg and Erik Roxfelt

Photographic book/catalogue by weaver and textile designer Åsa Pärson. The sample weave is Åsa’s sketch method for creating qualities with different characteristics where she distinguish between the tactility and the sensation of the textile. That is how the material behaves in the hand, against the skin and also how it looks. It is easy to replace a component and get a whole new result, a new surface, a new feeling that sometimes also becomes an association to something completely different from the weaving.