Lenneke Langenhuijsen

CumLaude

Prizes: Rene Smeets Award Nominee, Keep an Eye Grant Nominee

Department: Man and Well being
Website: www.lennekelangenhuijsen.com

Wooden Textiles

We think of wood as a solid material only. But what if wood could be made flexible? This is what Lenneke Langenhuijsen set out to do as part of her ongoing search for innovative materials. Her quest has taken her to the South Pacific island of Tonga, where locals beat the bark of the Paper Mulberry tree to make cloth. As part of her Wooden Textiles project, she has documented this ancient craft in a short film and expanded the basic principle to create a new, flexible fabric. Experimenting with techniques often only applied to textiles, such as dyeing and embroidery, she displayed them in an ‘inspiration book’ to showcase the full potential of wood as a basis for fabric. Moreover, she created a collection of interior textiles as well as a set of wooden stools formed and ‘upholstered’ with multiple layers of her fabric. A unique property of the material is that, unlike regular textiles, it can be moulded to hold any given shape, until it seamlessly assumes 3D characteristics.