Sanne Ransby
Mit grundarbejde er at undersøge striber og landskaber, bredt forstået, i vævens kontekst. Jeg arbejder med mødet og sprækkerne mellem orden; mønstring og natur; landskab, menneskelig bevægelse.
Jeg er optaget af hvad der sker når et strejf af et landskab eller en flygtig bevægelse bliver fastholdt i vævens sprog.
Når bittesmå farveskift kan bringes i svingninger og forandre sig med lysindfald og synsvinkel.
Hvornår en stribe opleves som stribe og når en erindring om et landskab kan synes lige så virkeligt som et virkeligt. Og når forskydninger i mønster og landskab inviterer til nye opfattelser af samme.
Med venlig hilsen
Sanne Ransby
Sanne Ransby
Tapestry-maker and visual artist Sanne Ransby works with colours, details and structures. As colourful statements her tapestries unfold with traces from nature, from humanity and with a constant and persistent investigation of when the work has reached a borderline of harmony, balance and beauty. The works move along this edge, and irrespective of subject and colour composition offer a distinctive aesthetic and sensory experience to the viewer.
The world of Sanne Ransby’s motifs is inspired by the simple and the universally human. Nature is seen in her works as foliage, leaf structures, organic forms and human figures, often appearing as silhouette-like forms that are mystifying and atmospheric. A stringent rhythm recurs in several works; it can be seen both directly as part of the motif – as a check pattern – and as an underlying principle in the actual structure of the weave. There is inspiration from Agnes Martin and an absorption in the visually absolutely quiet and contemplative. In several of the works both the organic and the stringent are present together – as a constant play on opposing perceptions of the world and of the visual: the organic and painterly as against the straight and linear.
In Sanne Ransby’s works their genesis and their subsequent interaction with the viewer demand presence, immersion, a feeling for the details and an ability to abandon oneself to the characters and interactions of the colours. Sanne Ransby’s work with colours is intensive and exploratory – they are investigated and selected carefully according to their interrelationships, strength, nuances etc. Nothing is left to chance.
Tapestries
Much of Sanne Ransby’s artistic production consists of tapestries woven in dyed woollen, silk, cotton and linen yarns. The actual warp of the flax (the threads that are stretched on the loom) works together with the colours of the images and in the surface structure. The flaxen yarn gives a rigour and a rhythm to the works that the other materials would not be able to produce alone, and it ‘breaks up’ the shades of the colours and gives them mobility and life when you look at them from different angles.
In the work Nocturne – in linen, cotton and silk as well as laser-cut cloth strips – a game is played all at the same time with the interrelations of the colours, the rhythm of the vertical strips, and an apparent encounter between three silhouette-like people. This hints at a story in an elegant film-noir-like aesthetic where the characters meet behind the layers of coloured strips.
In the large tapestry Travelling Companions – To Youth, Sanne Ransby, as a tribute to the commitment of the young to politics and society (after the massacre on Utøya), has taken her point of departure in a photograph of her young sons and a friend on a sofa, and sampled it together with photos of elongated everyday objects into a concentrated visual experience – once more with the figures as silhouettes in different colour layers that cross one another. The composition is bold; Ransby lets the subject hover almost exclusively in the left half of the tapestry, which gives the picture a slight bias to one side and a restlessness that suits the young people on the sofa. Viewed from a distance, the background is a bright, warm yellowish-green; close up one sees a confusion of different shades. The silhouettes, sampled and superimposed one on another, are in reddish and mauve shades – a bold juxtaposition of colours. Beautiful, but also challenging.
In Yellow-Violet there is a contemplative calm in the horizontal swaths of yellow and mauve/violet that succeed one another in a rhythmic structuring of the whole picture surface, interrupted only by coastal formations, reflections of island coasts in the sea. The structure of the weave is a vertically repeated pattern that gives the surface of the picture a vibrant effect.
In the tapestries the slowness of the weaving craft meets digital techniques. Both are essential to the expression.
Lasercuts
Another part of Sanne Ransby’s artistic practice consists of lasercuts, with inspiration in Japanese and old Syrian patterns and structures that have the rigour of contemporary art as well as an aesthetic delicacy. The inspiration from Japan can be seen in simple, beautiful batik prints that are given a rawness but also brand new narratives in the visual when, in interaction with Danish utility textiles, they form the background for lasercuts – once more a game that goes to the borderline of the beauty and aesthetic qualities of the perforated and torn. The works Coexistence II and Connection are both lasercuts in cloth where the torn look as well as the colours in green, yellowish and bright shades recall natural phenomena like foliage that grows in over the borderlines of human habitation, and speaks of our relationship with nature – extending all the way into human space. This is particularly striking in Connection, where the textile foliage hangs from the ceiling in a former dissecting room, catches the daylight from the windows and mixes visually with the foliage outside.
In Coexistence II plants from various continents have been ‘domesticated’ in a two-dimensional tapestry.
With a starting point in old Syrian patterns Sanne Ransby has created the series “Syrian Patterns in Clothes for Travelling”. The series consists of a number of mandala-like, laser-cut geometrical patterns cut out from practical everyday garments. The patterns are placed so that they activate the space in the best possible way. The patterns are simple and recognizable with their pure, mathematical absence of subjects, and at the same time are a topical political comment on the situation in Syria and the many people fleeing their native country.
Sanne Ransby’s works and working methods give the impression of an artist who, with passion and respect for the materials, insists on beauty and ‘edge’, on depth and attitude in content and statement.
Sidse Camilla Turvey Aaes