‘The Three Motions of Loom’ are three monumental woven tapestries, based on two fragments of Jeroen Olyslaegers’ novel-in-progress ‘Wildevrouw’. The Three Motions of Loom refers to the three basic movements of a weaving machine: Fundamental mechanics, Let off & Take up, and Auxiliary Stop Motions: Brake. Crouwers says: “The latter makes the machine - bam! - comes to a complete stop as soon as one of the 2600 wires breaks. That stopping is also a movement, which I find very poetic. On top of that, stop-motion makes a nice connection with animation.”
Alexandra Crouwers departs from two excerpts from novel 'Wildevrouw' set in Antwerp in the 16th century; a century in which the Middle Ages moved to the Renaissance, artistic highlights were intervened with wars and plague epidemics, and devotion was replaced by reason. At the time, the Southern region of The Netherlands was the epicenter of the tapestry industry. Crouwers imeresed herself into the 16th-century visual culture and produced three monumental woven wall hangings.
Fragments from Jeroen's texts appear in the edges of the tapestries and are hidden in the images themselves. However, the works are by no means illustrations of Jeroen's novel. The three tapestries are connected to it, but also stand on their own. The three tapestries are, like a rebus, full of references. For example, there are graphs showing CO2 levels and temperature fluctuations between 1500 and 2019. Or the prediction of sea level rise between now and the year 2100.
For Crouwers it was important to investigate a gobelin binding (a certain kind of stitch). The gobelin is a typical weaving method from the period around the 16th century.
Crouwers says about her process: “I had to learn to think in the material: thread, colour, textures, patterns. I constructed the designs in the same way as my video works: as a kind of virtual sets in the digital environment of 3D software. However, it soon became clear that my usual atmospheric animations could not be translated into a weaving work: the shades of grey, mist and thin colours had to be replaced by other ways in which I could gain depth and texture. You can't talk about the eclectic 16th-century visual language in minimalist black and white either.”
The works of Alexandra Crouwers (NL, 1974) constantly fluctuate between various media, landscape and architecture, materiality and immateriality, technology, and a broad sense of art history. Over the years, certain themes recur regularly: science fiction, eschatology and apocalyptic imagery, architectural structures, deserted landscapes, references to quantum mechanics and astronomy, time and decay. From October 2019 until 2023, Crouwers is working on a four-year phd in arts trajectory at Leuven University / LUCA School of Arts, Brussels.
