Carina Ellemers (1965) is a filmmaker and an artist in fine art. The last couple of years her attention is more focused at her stitched paintings, in which she plays a game of light and shadow, horizontals and verticals.

Read the article in Dutch ‘De stitched paintings van Carina Ellemers‘

What is the similarity between your films and your stitched paintings?
“As well as with film as with the stitched paintings editing, collage, bringing elements together is essential.”
You talk about paintings, you do not call them works on textile?
“No, I look and think as a painter. I see the textile material as a layer for a painting and this layer has my interest. Vincent van Gogh painted on a tea-towel. Mondrian took textile and did not pay any attention to it’s nature with the horizontals and the verticals. He washed it white, as if it was non-existing. The horizontal and vertical threads intrigues me. Geometric abstraction is already in it. It is more a research of merging textile and painting.”
How do you work?
“First I make sketches, I cut the cloth according the sketch. I sew the pieces of cloth together and stretch the cloth to the stretcher. By doing that the form changes. As often as I think is necessary I take the sewn cloth of, rearrange the pieces and put it on te stretcher again. Mostly I start painting after I put together the textile layer. What interests me is how the flexibility of the threads go together with geometrical abstraction. I use this flexible character of textile as an approach toward geometric abstraction. The flexibility of the threads are just as flexible as shadows of straight lines.”
Light is very important for you?
“My work is often about light and dark, open and closed. If I work with gauze you can actualy look through the painting. Other times it is just the character of the cloth or the paint that makes it look like it is open or closed.”

Edith Rijna – 2 July 2018