Finishing date: August 2024. Photographed by Katja Malmborg and Johan Enqvist in August 2024.
This is how my creative craft brain works: It wants a direction. Not an exact itinerary, just a point on the horizon to steer towards. It is in the relationship, when meeting some people, that it ignites in me. My best ideas are brought out in me by something in another person, a chord that they strike. A harmony, maybe, between who they are in the meeting with me, and what I have brewing in me at that moment in time.
It is not really about how much I like someone – although, generally I do really like the people who plant ideas in me. But there are also people I love deeply who I have not felt compelled to start creating pieces for. It is the same with my research. In conversation with some people, the ideas just keep on coming. It doesn’t happen in my brain, it is in the in-between. I don’t have a better way to explain it. The moment when a meeting evolves into a burst of creativity. I think, maybe, it is something unknowable. A secret. I am happy to let it be that way.
Rafael and I met in Arizona in 2023 at the science meeting for a researcher network we both belong to. Together with some others, we started a working group and began getting together online to discuss our research in monthly meetings. We met again a year later, in May 2024 when the researcher network came to have their science meeting in Nordhordland, where I do my research, and I got to show him and the others of our group around in this beautiful place that I’ve made mine, of heathlands and sea, fjords and mountains, sheep grazing on lushly green slopes.
One place I took them to was Maya’s farm. We helped with collecting the herd, weighing the lambs. Rafa, and all the others, loved it. He said: Maybe he wanted to become a sheep farmer in western Norway instead of finishing his PhD. But also, for the whole trip: Rafa’s caring presence and enthusiasm, his fascination with the jumper I was knitting, cooking and drinking wine together, it ignited a spark. I wanted to make him a jumper.
I mainly used Norwegian wool from the local Nordhordland spinners, Hillesvåg. But, as remembrance of that moment of possibility, I twined the farmer dreams into the jumper: For the brown sheep, I used yarn from Isdal gård, where Kjersti makes beautiful, very tactilely pleasant yarn from the wool of her old Norwegian spæl-sheep. Kjersti and Maya share rams for their herds. Meaning, it is possible that the lambs Rafa befriended at Maya’s farm are related to the sheep who provided the wool for Kjersti’s yarn, that I turned into sheep dancing on rainbows across Rafa’s shoulders. I have a weakness for story. There’s no denying that.
By the end of the summer, I was done. Rafa and I met again at a conference in Montreal, Canada, and I gave him his jumper. To me, it was perfect for him. And August in Montreal is really much too hot for a western Norwegian sheep wool jumper, but we had to photograph it anyway, in a rooftop garden at the end-of-conference party. Me, also, in my matching crocheted linen blazer, the still-in-progress embroidery my handicraft-based conference focusing tool.
This process. It made me feel good.
Katja Malmborg 