I am a friend of the Swedish artist Anna Olsson–or rather, I see her marvelous tapestries as a Facebook friend. I’d love to meet her in person. I really enjoy her use of color, her abstracted shapes, and the thought behind her images. She was recently featured in an online artisan site, the Homo Faber Guide. I love her tapestry with toothbrushes and a faucet. Look at the jaggedy, weaverly vertical lines of the toothbrushes.
From the description: “It is part of a series Anna Olsson calls Before the Disaster, which focuses on things we take for granted today but which may be hard-to-achieve luxuries in the future if the world as we know it collapses. Anna is often struck by the fact that we live as if disasters can never hit us, whereas other people and communities in other parts of the world face them daily.”
It reminded me of a Jennifer Bartlett painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, which I saw on a visit with my sister-in-law Carrie Moore, before the disaster, the pandemic disaster. Life is indeed precarious. This is my detail photo from Jennifer Bartlett’s Air: 24 Hours, Seven A.M. That’s an amazing painterly faucet.
Anna Olsson’s refugee series is amazing; see this description in Textile Curator.
And thanks, Anna, for reminding me of that NYC day and visit.