Christien Meindertsma awarded Mecca x NGV Women in Design commission
Christien Meindertsma is particularly known for her work with wool, and reimagining what once might have ended up as landfill.
Netherlands-based artist Christien Meindertsma has been announced at the 2024 Mecca x NGV Women in Design commission.
The annual series provides a platform and the chance to create a major new work, for women in art and design. Previous recipients include Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao in 2022 and British designer Bethan Laura Wood in 2023.
Meindertsma, whose work has been shown in MoMA (New York) and The Victoria and Albert Museum (London) among others, is particularly known for her work with wool, particularly reimagining what once might have been considered waste. This includes her work One sheep sweater, in which she produced 20 jumpers from the coats of individual merino sheep and the multi award-winning Flax Chair, a biodegradable piece of furniture.
“I don’t really see waste as waste, but more, I think all products and materials are just part of a journey and they’re temporarily something and then they travel on to be something else,” says Meindertsma of her approach to materials.
“I think in the current system, a lot of materials are kind of stuck in a material or a product, and they should be designed so that they keep on travelling without being harmful or without being stuck somewhere or ending up somewhere in a landfill. So it’s more that I see objects and materials always on the way and not in a fixed state.”
Central to her work is the use of technology, including robotics –which she built with the help of engineers – and 3D printing.
Meindertsma likes the juxtaposition of materials that have always existed with new industries and technologies.
“What I really like about working with wool is that it’s really a sort of ancient material,” she says.
“It’s a material that’s been with us for a very long time, and you can still work with it in the way that it’s unaltered in a sense that it’s always been. And I think it has really many qualities, and we are also connected to it in a very deep way through our ancestors, but then we don’t really know that well on the surface.”
Meindertsma is also quick to point out the Australian merino wool is considered in a different way – including in innovations such as the prestigious Woolmark Prize in fashion – to the Dutch wool she primarily works with and that is often discarded.
“[It] seems as if wool is very much marketed and loved and researched [in Australia],” she says.
“But if you stand outside of this context in a European context, it is also to me, it comes across also as it’s marketing one version of what wool is...In Europe, almost nobody wears, or very few people wear a local wool because we’re all used to Merino wool...But in fact, there are many kinds of wool. So I thought, I want to design a machine or a robot that can print local wool, especially coarser wools, or wools that are less clean and less perfect.”
That said, she is excited to visit Australian wool growers when she visits Australia later in the year.
“It’s really exciting because it’s such a big wool country, and also it’s just a part of the world that I’ve never been...,” she says.
“I think merino wool is amazing, and I totally understand why its quality has become so important. It’s just that I would like to emphasise that it’s not the only fibre.”
The new commission, still in its early stages and to be presented in October until February 2025, will give Meindertsma the opportunity to push her creative practice forward.
“It’s really a very free commission, and it’s quite a large commission as well. So it really enables me to make a really big step in the material development,” she says.
Simone LeAmon, senior curator of contemporary design and architecture at the NGV agrees.
“Over the past two decades, Christien Meindertsma’s design work has illuminated new paths of exploration and creativity, urging a reevaluation of our interactions with materials, waste and industry,” Amon says.
“As design becomes an ever-stronger shaper of our environment, her forward-thinking approach beckons us to envision the untapped potential at our fingertips. Christien’s commission for MECCA and NGV is evidence of this, pioneering a 3D robotic felting method for waste wool.”
For Meindertsma, the project will also allow, she hopes, audiences to interact with her work in a different way.
“Because I’m a product designer, things often have a relationship towards a specific kind of use,” she says.
“So in that sense, when it’s used, then it’s doing its job. But this commission is going to be a very large piece that’s really, it’s used, it’s actually testing and trialing a new technique. So in that sense, it’s different that it doesn’t have to be a seat or a shelter, or it doesn’t have, per se. Its use is to push the technology further. So what it’s supposed to do is to broaden the idea of what wool can be. So it should be wool in a completely different shape than before. That would be the goal.”
The new work will be unveiled toward the end of the year.
Meindertsma will be in Australia at the NGV on Saturday March 9 for a day of programming to celebrate women in design, including a conversation with Jo Horgan, AM, founder & co-CEO Mecca ,and a drop-in workshop.
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