When Joana Schneider moved to The Hague, she started visiting the beach regularly. After spending her childhood in Munich, the sea was a novel and a fertile source of inspiration. Soon the fishermen working in the harbor caught her attention.
“There was something so intriguing about their world, which seemed to straddle the line between rough work and delicate artistry,” Schneider tells Colossal. “They used knotting techniques, traditionally seen as feminine and delicate, but on a much larger scale, with heavy ropes.”
The artist soon connected what the fishermen created with the traditions of textile art and began collecting their leftover rope. Now based on
KNSM Island in Amsterdam, Schneider continues to use sailor material in her large-scale sculptures. “I spend days untangling the nets before I can start working on them. Then I dry the ropes in the sun, which gives them an ocean scent,” she adds.
Once dried out, the materials often become the structure for thin, colorful yarn that the artist wraps around the strands. The completed works are sometimes abstract and others powerfully figurative, depicting exaggerated facial features in rolled, hand-stitched patchwork.
The process is labor intensive, but the slow, methodical movements are part of what Schneider is drawn to. “Each turn of the yarn around the rope is a calm, concentrated action. There’s something very earthy about it. The rhythm of the winding, the gentle tension of the yarn and the soft texture of the fibers create a peaceful space where the world outside seems to fade away,” she says. The resulting works contain evidence of this painstaking process, in which large and small coils swell outward in perfectly concentric circles.
Schneider is currently working on a solo exhibition titled Alien which opens in April in the Groningen Museum in the Netherlands. Blurring the line between the real and the fantastic, the project builds on the artist’s fascination with hybridity and includes a performative element, a harbinger of where her practice is headed. She shares:
When I think of the natural world, I often think of the Renaissance tradition of grotesque art. It fascinates me how artists of that period mixed human, animal and plant forms in complicated ways… The result is a hybrid environment that is at once familiar and strange. That’s something I try to achieve in my work: a sense of wonder and a bit of disorientation, as if you’re entering a place where the boundaries of the natural world are deliberately blurred.
Schneider’s sculptures are currently on display at the FITE Textile Biennale in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and will be included in a group exhibition at the König Galerie in Munich in 2025. Until then, you can find more of her work her website And Instagram.
