— Feature
Annet Couwenberg
Winter is a season of family gathering. But to the artist known for marrying traditional textile practice and digital fabrication, it can also be a creative revelation.
“ ‘Whose shoulders am I standing on?’ is a question I often pose of my work, but now I reflect on Mara and B and ask, ‘What of my heritage will be preserved or should be preserved, and what of it should be questioned?’ ”
What knowledge and customs do we embrace in our search to define ourselves? Which ones do we leave behind? And what aspects of our identity are impossible to control, no matter how hard we try?
These questions have intrigued Baltimore-based artist Annet Couwenberg since her childhood in Rotterdam, where three generations of Couwenberg women would gather every Tuesday for a sewing circle. “From their making I learned about their character, about who they were, [as well as] how their methods reflected their personalities, the culture, and how they perceived their roles in life,” she recalls. Technique was as formative as the final textile.
Couwenberg also notes times when the formation of an artistic identity eluded her control. At her first-ever student presentation at Cranbrook, for example, a visiting artist took one look at Couwenberg’s work and announced that it was forged by northern European hands; the critique made her think about an inescapable “ancestral intelligence” and “how I could move [that] into the present and the future.”
Today, while Couwenberg’s work makes overt reference to Delftware and other signatures of Dutch culture, she is equally interested in the processes by which these objects are made — and how she might replace them with more contemporary construction techniques. Among other things, she has conceived a contemporary lace by CNC-cutting polyethylene into interconnecting Y shapes, investigated Jacquard digital weaving, and become so fluent in the software platform Rhino that BmoreArt magazine stated, “In her own studio practice, Couwenberg has so neatly dovetailed technology with traditional craft methods that the two can’t be separated.”
Couwenberg’s work got BmoreArt’s chief editor Cara Ober to wondering whether there were other intersections for the artist to explore. In 2019, Ober asked Couwenberg how the shape of her futuristic origami and lace might change on the human form. Couwenberg had thought about textiles as a kind of skin that grows with the body and responds to environmental stimuli. She had not created textiles explicitly to be worn since a stint in New York’s fashion industry in the early 1980s.
Ober’s musing sparked a new exploration for Couwenberg, who agreed to formulate an answer that would become A Family Affair. For the photo essay, the artist and her husband Dan Meyers, as well as their daughter Mara Meyers and her partner B Bonner, convened in Baltimore on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic to dress in Couwenberg’s artworks.
A Family Affair interpreted Couwenberg’s textile constructions as Dutch collars, in part because the artist had been trying to dissect the inherent contradictions of ruffs since 2001: “it is quite beautiful and it makes you look quite important, but it is very much a constriction,” Couwenberg says of the garment; “you have to wear it to belong to a position or a group of people, but you can’t move in it. You can’t do the work of belonging.” Through A Family Affair, Couwenberg has begun to think of Dutch collars in new ways — perhaps as a metaphor for the personal traits that family members can express or suppress to maintain the group peace. The shift has also prompted Couwenberg to think about her own work’s relationship to family history. “‘Whose shoulders am I standing on?’ is a question I often pose of my work, but now I reflect on Mara and B and ask, ‘What of my heritage will be preserved or should be preserved, and what of it should be questioned?’”
Couwenberg’s monograph Sewing Circles, which surveys work completed in the past decade, will be published in February. As for what follows, the artist anticipates more trusting collaborations: “Could they lead to additional pattern-breaking reversals? Can we rewrite the future together?” Whatever these answers, they will be a testament to the power of family.
What knowledge and customs do we embrace in our search to define ourselves? Which ones do we leave behind? And what aspects of our identity are impossible to control, no matter how hard we try?
These questions have intrigued Baltimore-based artist Annet Couwenberg since her childhood in Rotterdam, where three generations of Couwenberg women would gather every Tuesday for a sewing circle. “From their making I learned about their character, about who they were, [as well as] how their methods reflected their personalities, the culture, and how they perceived their roles in life,” she recalls. Technique was as formative as the final textile.
“ ‘Whose shoulders am I standing on?’ is a question I often pose of my work, but now I reflect on Mara and B and ask, ‘What of my heritage will be preserved or should be preserved, and what of it should be questioned?’ ”
Couwenberg also notes times when the formation of an artistic identity eluded her control. At her first-ever student presentation at Cranbrook, for example, a visiting artist took one look at Couwenberg’s work and announced that it was forged by northern European hands; the critique made her think about an inescapable “ancestral intelligence” and “how I could move [that] into the present and the future.”
Today, while Couwenberg’s work makes overt reference to Delftware and other signatures of Dutch culture, she is equally interested in the processes by which these objects are made — and how she might replace them with more contemporary construction techniques. Among other things, she has conceived a contemporary lace by CNC-cutting polyethylene into interconnecting Y shapes, investigated Jacquard digital weaving, and become so fluent in the software platform Rhino that BmoreArt magazine stated, “In her own studio practice, Couwenberg has so neatly dovetailed technology with traditional craft methods that the two can’t be separated.”
Couwenberg’s work got BmoreArt’s chief editor Cara Ober to wondering whether there were other intersections for the artist to explore. In 2019, Ober asked Couwenberg how the shape of her futuristic origami and lace might change on the human form. Couwenberg had thought about textiles as a kind of skin that grows with the body and responds to environmental stimuli. She had not created textiles explicitly to be worn since a stint in New York’s fashion industry in the early 1980s.
Ober’s musing sparked a new exploration for Couwenberg, who agreed to formulate an answer that would become A Family Affair. For the photo essay, the artist and her husband Dan Meyers, as well as their daughter Mara Meyers and her partner B Bonner, convened in Baltimore on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic to dress in Couwenberg’s artworks.
A Family Affair interpreted Couwenberg’s textile constructions as Dutch collars, in part because the artist had been trying to dissect the inherent contradictions of ruffs since 2001: “it is quite beautiful and it makes you look quite important, but it is very much a constriction,” Couwenberg says of the garment; “you have to wear it to belong to a position or a group of people, but you can’t move in it. You can’t do the work of belonging.” Through A Family Affair, Couwenberg has begun to think of Dutch collars in new ways — perhaps as a metaphor for the personal traits that family members can express or suppress to maintain the group peace. The shift has also prompted Couwenberg to think about her own work’s relationship to family history. “‘Whose shoulders am I standing on?’ is a question I often pose of my work, but now I reflect on Mara and B and ask, ‘What of my heritage will be preserved or should be preserved, and what of it should be questioned?’”
Couwenberg’s monograph Sewing Circles, which surveys work completed in the past decade, will be published in February. As for what follows, the artist anticipates more trusting collaborations: “Could they lead to additional pattern-breaking reversals? Can we rewrite the future together?” Whatever these answers, they will be a testament to the power of family.
