Aliki van der Kruijs finds inspiration in the colours, textures and shapes of nature. In '1cm = 1000 years', she captures the layered marl landscape of Maastricht’s ENCI quarry in a woven tapestry made of linen and paper.
During her residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Van der Kruijs made a weekly pilgrimage to the ENCI quarry in Maastricht. Once an important excavation site for marlstone, it is now a nature reserve. There is only one footpath through the quarry. The ritual of making this walk each week reminded Van der Kruijs of the continuous back and forth motion of preparing a warp.
One centimetre of marl is, on average, a compression of material over the course of a thousand years. This project investigates the notion of scale and time in the formation of the earth. A hundred years of excavation in the ENCI quarry laid bare a 70-million-year sedimentation process of marl and flintstone. Van der Kruijs explored this large-scale industrial mining by designing a tapestry that captures the sediment’s texture, colour and layers, presenting a soft statement about raw building materials.
The process rather than the result is at the heart of this project. Screen printing tests that Van der Kruijs carried out with marl produced a visual language that reminded her of programming weaves on a loom. In the TextielLab she experimented with different ways to build up the fabric, using different materials and without 'unnecessary' decorative details. For this project, she opted for a combination of beige paper and linen in a plain weave, which most closely resembles the colour and texture of marl. The stiffness and coarseness of the yarns give the fabric a monumental character.
Both the front and back of the fabric is an 'image', with the extra floats on the back giving the impression of water. This is a reference to the way marl is formed on the seabed. The coarser yarn and two-tone design produced larger floats in various places, allowing the thick yarns to form beautiful slubs (irregular textured areas), just like the marl in the ENCI quarry.
Aliki van der Kruijs (1984) is a designer and researcher. She questions and visualises the relationship between people, nature, colour and space, with a strong focus on textiles. After finishing her master’s in applied art at the Sandberg Institute, she established her own studio in 2012. She often initiates research projects and collaborations herself, the results of which are shown in the Netherlands and abroad. In 2020-2021, she took part in the residency programme at the Jan van Eyck Academie, an international post-academic institute for visual arts, design and reflection in Maastricht.
‘Open Studios 2021’, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, June-July 2021
