sky & sea / himmel & hav

SKY & SEA (HIMMEL & HAV)

Artist: Textile and knitwear designer Iben Høj

Curator: Lawrence Ebelle
Location: Brønshøj Vandtårn
Year: 2024
Graphics: Trefold

Water is our most precious resource.

It shapes, sustains and impacts our lives in an infinite number of ways.

Sky & Sea is the first instalment of an exhibition triptych – Water Stories – at Brønshøj water tower, where curator Lawrence Ebelle wants to make us reflect on our water and our environment. Sky & Sea is also an occasion to explore artists’ enduring fascination with water and our relationship to it.

Textile designer and artist Iben Høj has been given carte blanche to express herself creatively within the architectural space of the water tower. Høj who is inspired by nature in her artistic practice, invites the audience into a poetic space of contemplation between sky and sea.

Using meters of long, gossamer, colored threads she has knitted a piece which is like meanders that flow between beams and pillars in the former water cathedral. The delicate banners are metaphorical reminders of the dual nature of water; both powerful and fragile. Meanwhile the rough surfaces of the water tower’s reinforced concrete contrast with the colored threads and delicate, veil-thin fibers in the meeting between the knitted and the folded, the handmade and the mass-produced, the soft and the hard, the transparent and the condensed.

The columns of the water tower stretch towards the sky, while Høj’s poetic work unfolds horizontally, undulating like the surface of the sea. The tension between the two plans reveals new volumes of textile and the visitors are invited to experience the many angles of the room by moving around and between the columns under the knitted sky, where color combinations, threads and motifs encourage to play with appearances and spaces, in a moment of reflection, on the meeting between human, sea and sky, where we fully understand what is at stake if we do not protect our most valuable resource.

We thank the following foundations and sponsors for their support of the exhibition:

Grosserer L. F. Foghts Fond

Ellen & Knud Dalhoff Larsens Fond

Forening Brønshøj Vandtårn