Can you tell us about how your collaboration began?
Our friendship goes back to eight years ago when we met at Design School Kolding where we were both doing an undergraduate’s degree in textile design. We became friends but it wasn’t before our postgraduate studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts that our creative partnership began. That’s three years ago now.
We came to work together through a school project on functionality and ergonomics. We were both stranded as to what we were going to do and found each other through a common defiance, doing instead a project about the exact opposite: sensuousness, colors and light. The result was the work Monitor that we exhibited at the Ukurant 2020 Exhibition; an exploration of folded paper objects that both shielded and filtered natural light.
What are the most important elements in your work?
We investigate how the interplay of color, patterns and scale affects our perception. Our eternal starting point is to uncover how we as individuals experience colors and patterns, exploring how these elements influence the bodily experience. On a more pragmatic level, we seek to challenge the traditional printing technique of screen printing by contrasting it with digitally developed patterns. For this year’s Ukurant exhibition, we’ll be showing a series of screen-printed textiles that have been developed using both reactive dye and color discharge, leaving the two textiles with two different expressions and color identities.
Do you find that there is a purpose or maybe even a set of values that permeate your design process?
We find motivation in the hope of a future where the textile craft receives the recognition that we believe it that it deserves. We’d like to move on from the In our roles as textile designers, we want to emphasize the craft’s unique ability to create atmospheres and sensuous experiences in spatial contexts and, through that, equal the feminine element of sensuousness with the masculine-perceived element of functionality.
What were your thoughts behind participating in last year’s Ukurant Exhibition?
Being part of Ukurant came from a desire towards expanding our network across various design disciplines as well as it being an opportunity for us as a newly founded duo to partake in 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen and show our work to the world. We find that what makes Ukurant incredibly relevant today is their ability to show how artistic qualities and aesthetic sensibilities can be joined together with the commercial elements of the design industry through its dynamic curation in terms of both aesthetics and design disciplines.
This year’s Ukurant exhibition is dubbed Ukurant Perspectives. How do you seek to create new perspectives in your work?
The dialogues and reflections that naturally occur from our collaboration challenge us as individuals and designers. Through that, our process becomes more unpredictable and thus, more innovative. We continuously search for new perspectives in both theoretical areas and the craft itself, discussing what we see and experience but also why we experience these very things. At the heart of our strive to create new perspectives is, to us, the unexplored potential of textile crafts in relation to other design disciplines, be it architecture, industrial design or the like. We want to use our knowledge within color, scale, light and materiality to enhance and evolve this potential.
Click here to follow Tronhjem Rømer’s work.
The Ukurant Perspectives 2021 Exhibition will be open from 16th to 26th of September 2021 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Ukurant Perspectives 2021
Amaliegade 38
DK-1256 Copenhagen K
Adding to that, an artwork by Ukurant alumni Davide Ronco & Pablo Dorigo Sempere for Muuto will be displayed at both the Muuto HQ during 3daysofdesign alongside the Muuto collection as well as at the Ukurant Perspectives 2021 exhibition.
Muuto HQ
Østergade 36-38
DK-1100 Copenhagen K