Ellen Dynebrink (SE)

Ellen Dynebrink reinterprets the traditional patchwork technique through digital processing and a subtle play of abstraction and optical illusion. Her hypnotic works evoke draperies fluttering in the air, though they are in fact images of frozen movement—pixelated memories of once-living textiles. Through this process, Ellen revives the “forgotten textiles”—curtains, sheets, towels—everyday materials that quietly shape our daily lives, yet rarely enter collective memory. In her work, air becomes the carrier of image and space, a medium through which subjectivity gets filtered. Compositions made up of hundreds of small squares appear from a distance as frozen moments of movement— meditative scenes where memory and reality meet within a textile mesh.

Ellen Dynebrink is a textile artist based in Gothenburg. Ellen’s focus on patchwork in particular derives from her love for the textile material and interest in the relationship between the textile field and women’s history. With her practice she seeks to explore values and preconceived notions in feminine coded expressions and techniques. Throughout Ellen’s work there is an ongoing investigation of the gap between the production of images and representation, and the relationship between the gaze and the image.

By using digital tools, she edit and convert photos and sketches which in later hand are sewn into patchwork. Digital distortions combined with the inherent limitations and specific conditions of the patchwork technique, and the characteristics of the textile material adds to the aesthetic outcome, offering further filtration of abstraction and alternative readings of the patchwork image. Even the monotonous process of cutting squares apart and sewing them together forms a central part of Ellen’s artistic language and expression – a kind of meditation on the material and a way to ”participate in” or ”lose herself in” the image.