🎨PAINT series

What happens when revisiting the thing we had left behind?
In this series of work I, Vilde Rudjord, use an ancient technique from 1985, the primitive drawing program Microsoft Paint. A tool I knew inside out at an early age, as most children of the early 2000s. I now use it as a graphic tool, to simply draw, and as a reflection on time. The program’s limitations and flatness have a distinctive expression which the I work actively with. Through bright coloured surfaces the images play on the notion of a lost world, and what contemporary art is today.

24.5.jpg — From the exhibition “SHED”, Skur 53 Nyhavna 2021

Svin i skogen / PIG

2020

Jacquard weave

Wool yarn

170 x 250 cm

Vildes bok / The Book of Vilde
2005
Artist book

I veien

2021

Jacquard weave

Chenille- and wool yarn.

148 x 240 cm

Vilde Rudjord : 🎨Paint series
Ideas of the digital and the textile might seem like polar opposites. While we associate the digital with abstract or mathematical values, represented by a series of discrete values (the numbers zero and one), the textile is something personal, touchable, tactile and intimate. However, textile techniques, especially the craft of weaving was fundamental to the development of modern computing technology. Punching cards became instrumental to data processing technology in the first half of the 20th century. These cards were adopted from weaving technology; as early as 1804, punching cards were used to automate looms. In the Jacquard loom, hundreds of punched cards were chained together in order to produce complex, woven patterns.

This dichotomy between the digital and the textile is explored in Vilde Rudjord’s MS Paint Series. Working in the vintage graphics editing software Microsoft Paint, Rudjord creates drawings with the software’s characteristic digital lines and marks. In the two tapestries I veien (2021) and Svin i Skogen (2020), digital drawings are transferred to large-scale textile surfaces. Both tapestries are woven on a digital jacquard loom, translating binary codes into woven structures.

In Rudjord’s tapestries, the monochrome surfaces and graphic figures with blocky, pixelated edges emphasize their digital origin. Combining intuitive and sketch-like drawings with the time-consuming labor of weaving, these tapestries comment on time: only through digital technology could complex weaves be produced in a manner of hours rather than months. Thus, the ways in which this project addresses notions of the textile and the digital is twofold: through digital painting software and digital Jacquard technology, Rudjord challenges established notions about what textiles fundamentally represent. The MS Paint Series explores the digital potency of weaving, focusing on the woven surface’s visual rather than material effects.

Written by: Ingrid Lunnan Nødseth, NTNU, September 2021.