Here: Softspace — Textile Room Object → Softspace is the generic title that the textile designer Marie Schumann gives to a series of complex weavings designed to animate our living space. Translucent patterns, free-floating lines of light, these objects inhabit architecture like intriguing ‘stargates’. As the New York Times Magazine wrote in 2019: “One of the best projects on view at Satellite, the section of the Salone fairgrounds dedicated to showcasing young designers, wasn’t furniture at all but Zurich-based Marie Schumann’s luminous wall hangings. Made from ombré cotton or polyester and draped threads of metallic Lurex, they were almost three-dimensional, more like artworks than textile designs.”
Marie Schumann
Fashion + Textile Design
There: Mills and miles → Schumann has for some years been engaged in a long-term research process, experimenting with the physical qualities of the materials right at the machines, working at the Swiss weaving factory Tisca in Bühler, but also on the Jacquard mills available at the textile development centre TextielLab in Tilburg (NL). She uses traditional cotton, polyester and metallic threads of Lurex. While still on an exploration path, working on a piece-by-piece, step-by-step process, she keeps the digital coding of the weaving, with an eye to a serial production process.
Everywhere: Radical expansion → “Similarly to Fontana’s slashes which became an ‘eloquent visual argument for a radical expansion of the medium’, Schumann’s experimentations with floats and fibres have the potential to ‘radically expand’ the properties of weaving”, reads the feature about Schumann in COVER magazine. Indeed, Schumann reappropriates a tradition of mobile space and architecture ornament, in a world where mobility and flexibility define contemporary life patterns. Her current research, introducing LED and optical fibres right into the weaving, takes her space design a step further.
Education → MA in Textile Design, HSLU, Lucerne; BA in Textile Design, HAW, Hamburg
Project(s) → Softspace — Textile Room Object, 2019