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

Ida Pettersson Preutz's work centers around optical illusions. She is inspired by the great op art pioneers such as Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley. All her fabrics are hand-dyed, hand-painted or screen printed, allowing her to be very specific in her colour palette, often choosing vibrating neon tones. More recently though, Pettersson Preutz has explored the possibilities of the grey scale, as presented at Fiberspace during the exhibition -visual-illusion-confusion- in October 2019.

She works meticulously stitching every pixel of fabric into laser-straight rows and then stitching the rows into unique quilted compositions. The reverse of her pieces is just as attractive as the front, with the added dimension of showcasing her craftsmanship and the threads that, in spite of everything, will not be tamed by the grid . Her material of choice is often cotton, though polyester, velvet and tulle make an appearance once in a while.