Once a church, the Grote Kerk in Veere now hosts a range of imaginative art and culture projects. A good example of this is the installation by Karin van Dam. The work is a labyrinth of knits, tubes and buoys that visitors can wander around and through, in which she combines history with new, innovative techniques.
Knitted objects, which resulted from experiments with wool and fishing line in the TextielLab, are a prominent feature. The installation is abstract but with clear references to Veere, the church and the city's rich trading history on and around the water. Van Dam’s aim was to give the space a new meaning, by bringing the stories from outside in and presenting them in abstract form, so that each person can interpret them differently.
Van Dam developed the hanging knits in collaboration with the TextielLab’s product developer Damien Semerdjian. Each knit contains approximately 500 grams of fishing line and 375 grams of wool. There are 120 of these objects, amounting to no less than 60 kilos of fishing line and 45 kilos of wool. Three types of wool were used for the installation: sheep’s wool, alpaca wool and mohair.
Artist Karin van Dam (1959) is known for creating installations made with materials such as boat fenders, rope and insulation pipes. She sees her installations as spatial drawings through which viewers can walk. Indeed, the installations always start out as small drawings. Here too she often integrates spatial objects such as rubber caps, rope and wooden sticks. Urban structures and street patterns are an important source of inspiration, which she then translates freely and intuitively, guided by the possibilities that the chosen materials and objects offer her.
