Elin Noble & Lasse Antonsen - The Apple Tree on the Abandoned Railroad Line
In the organizer's words:
Elin Noble & Lasse Antonsen
The Apple Tree on the Abandoned Railroad Line*
Textile wall works
19.05.-07.09.2025
Opening: 18.05.2025 19:00
Introduction: Beatrijs Sterk
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During their artist-in-residence stay in the small Danish town of Assens on the island of Funen, the artist couple Elin Noble and Lasse Antonsen, who live in the USA, came across an abandoned railroad line that stretches for around 30 kilometers from Assens to Tommerup. The railroad line was built in 1884 and closed in 1993 after more than 100 years of operation.
On the island of Funen, people like to eat the local apples, and the core is often simply thrown out of the window on train journeys. While the railroad line was in operation, undergrowth and vegetation were regularly removed along the tracks, but after it was closed, the trees were allowed to grow freely. Today, there are many mature apple trees along the line.
On a walk along the tracks, Noble and Antonsen came across a wild apple tree with astringent apples. Elin Noble, who works as a dyer, immediately recognized that the leaves contained flavonoids, which provide a yellow dye. Inspired, she collected apples, leaves and twigs from the tree. Noble then began dyeing silk, linen, ramie and cotton, producing a variety of yellows and golds.
For their first work together, Nobel and Antonsen decided to create artworks based on the principle of a test strip - a small piece of fabric partially immersed in a dye bath to test the effect of the color and concentration. For the actual artworks, however, they used much larger rectangular pieces of fabric. These were dipped in iron solution, which produced a wide range of black, gray and green tones, or in titanium solution, which resulted in a variety of orange tones.
Most of the works on display are made of transparent silk organza. The rectangular pieces of fabric were layered in a minimalist, repetitive pattern, visually merging the colors and creating deeper, richer tones.
Antonsen and Noble see their work as a search for beauty and a tribute to the infinite variety of color and light in nature.
Previous stages of the exhibition:
2022/23
- Narrow Center for the Arts in Fall River, Massachusetts, USA
- Fiber Art Fair, Seoul Art Center and Bojagi Forum, Seoul, South Korea
- High Five Art, Baarle-Nassau, Netherlands
After the stop at workshop hannover, the exhibition will be shown at Tobaksgaarden, Assens, Denmark (20.9.-30.11.25).
Lasse Antonsen
Lasse Antonsen is a Danish artist, art historian and curator born in Copenhagen in 1947. In his youth he attended a school for experimental art. After spending several years in Spain and Morocco, he studied art history at the University of Copenhagen. In 1978, Antonsen moved to the USA to continue his studies at Tufts University, where he graduated in 1985 with a master's degree in art history. He worked as a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston and was director of the art gallery at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth for 25 years, where he presented artists such as Ana Mendieta, Frank Stella, Ilya Kabakov and Nancy Spero.
Elin Noble
Elin Noble is an internationally recognized textile artist. She was born in Munich to American parents. She spent two years of her childhood in Okinawa, Japan, before growing up in Alameda, California, and later in Seattle, Washington. She studied textile art at the University of Washington in Seattle. In her first year, Noble studied art history in Florence for a semester. From 1992-1996, she was a lab manager at PRO Chemical & Dye, a dye distributor in Fall River, Massachusetts. Noble's fabrics and quilts have been exhibited in North and South America, Europe, Japan, China and South Korea. She also teaches classes internationally in textile art and dyeing techniques.
*(The apple tree on the disused railroad line)
This content has been machine translated.Location
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