Weaving Water
Aliki Van der Kruijs and Jos Klarenbeek’s project Kadans 2.0 turns oceanographical data into an ever-changing weaving pattern that captures the motion of the sea (image: Lonneke van der Palen).
Before they met, designers Aliki van der Kruijs and Jos Klarenbeek both created work which shone a light on subtle natural processes. But while Van der Kruijs’s work is intuitive and tactile, featuring textiles with patterns made from droplets of rain, Klarenbeek takes a more systematic approach, making geometric patterns using old and new paving stones to create a method where aged stones have aesthetic value. Nevertheless, when their work was placed side by side at an exhibition at the Zuiderzee museum, they saw the similarities. “He told me, ‘I think I understand you,’” Van der Kruijs remembers. “So that’s how we started to work together.”
Their first collaboration, Kadans 2.0, combines their differing approaches to translate the motion of the sea into an ever-changing weaving pattern. “It kind of clicked together that we could create a collection of textiles that is super tactile and organic and really represents the sea, but has this very precise mathematical background underlying it,” Klarenbeek says. The pair teamed up with RNDR, an interactive media design studio, to create a bespoke weaving software using open-source data collected by the Dutch government via offshore buoys and platforms that monitor wind, wave and acidity conditions along the coastline of the Netherlands. When the project first began in 2017, they used shaft looms that mapped the movement of the sea like a graph, but later they switched to Jacquard looms which enabled them to translate the data using a mathematical formula employed in oceanography. “The data makes an image that is created from the source, rather than from above,” Van der Kruijs explains. “It almost visualises the sea like a blanket.”
Klarenbeek and Van der Kruijs experimented with different textures and colours to capture the movement of the sea (image: Lonneke van der Palen).
The pair experimented with different textures that embody the motion of the sea, creating patches of looser weaves to represent the foamy crests of waves and twining different coloured yarns together to capture its shifting tones. “We don't see the loom as a printer,” Klarenbeek says, explaining that they always start by creating hand-woven tests. “The data is one of the ingredients of the work, but definitely not all of it.” Instead of focusing on one particular application for their textiles, they have created an archive of different fabrics that could be used for upholstery, tapestries, blankets and more. “It’s almost like an open source we can use to collaborate with people,” Van der Kruijs says. The resulting textiles feature silvery yarns that mimic the sheen of sunshine on water or ribbons of dark yellow that capture a sunset warming the waves, while others use strips of white paper to create a strikingly flat, map-like effect. “When the paper is added, it gives a graph-like feeling, like a historical scroll,” Van der Kruijs explains.
Klarenbeek and Van der Kruijs created patterns using a bespoke weaving software which prints code that is then used to create hand-woven samples on the loom (image: Lonneke van der Palen).
All of the textiles are adaptable to different scales. “Our original idea was to have a loom linked up to a satellite that would run in real time, weaving the sea in that moment,” Van der Kruijs says. Since starting Kadans 2.0, the pair have collaborated with architects to make Sky Dial (2020), a curtain that represents the changing colours of the sky over a 24-hour cycle, and Solide (2023), a series of decorative elements for a building facade that capture the colours and textures of the layers of sand that have converged on the site over time. “For Kadans 2.0, we would love to work with a space like a theatre, and upholster all the chairs so you can see the constant motion of the sea,” Van der Kruijs says. On a smaller scale, they turned a dataset of a storm at sea into a tapestry of roaring, muscular waves for Garage Rotterdam, and created pleated blankets that resemble ripples on water, a potential product they have discussed adapting to represent the sea on a special date, such as someone’s birthday.
The pair created a tapestry for Garage Rotterdam using a dataset of a storm at sea (image: Aad Hoogendoorn).
Human relationships with the sea are complex: it can be traversed to embark on adventures or navigated at great peril to reach safety; it represents joy and leisure as well as chaos and fear. With its variety of scales and textures, Kadans 2.0 is able to flit between these emotions, turning the sea into a soft, comforting blanket while also capturing its vastness and fury. “In the Netherlands, we are living under sea level, so we have more of a threat from it,” Van der Kruijs says. “We also have a history of big wall tapestries depicting battles at sea.” Instead of weaving a human tale, with boats tipping over and people bobbing between the waves, Kadans 2.0 flips the perspective. “We facilitate the sea to tell its story,” Klarenbeek says.
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown