Hedda Lindqvist

Hedda Lindqvist weaves on a Jacquard loom she bought from a bankrupt curtain manufacturer in 1989 and rebuilt over four years. It sits in a former fishing net factory on Orust, and it is the only tool she has used since.

The loom is programmed rather than drawn. Lindqvist writes her patterns from numerical sources, most consistently the movements of cargo vessels through the Skagerrak, which she has been logging since the 1970s, first from a coastguard radio and now from public transponder data. A year of shipping becomes a set of instructions and the instructions become cloth. She does not adjust the output for aesthetic reasons. If a quiet month produces a dull passage of weaving, the dull passage stays.

The results are large, up to four metres, in undyed linen and wool with a small number of dyed wefts that mark specific categories of vessel. Read closely they are legible as data. Read from across a room they behave like landscape, which Lindqvist finds funny and not especially significant. She points out that the sea is also just a very large number of small events.

Lindqvist worked for three decades with almost no exhibition history before a 2016 survey at Bildmuseet Umeå. Her work is now held by Nationalmuseum Stockholm, the Museum of Modern Art New York and Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum. She joined the gallery in 2017.