CLAUDY JONGSTRA: FELT FOR FASHION, HOME DECORATION AND ARCHITECTURE

by Ingeborg de Roode

in Kunstlicht 26 (2005) ¾
p. 82 – 90


From elegant to raw, from natural to (what looks like) synthetic colors, and from basic plain design to figurative patterns: in the last decade designer Claudy Jongstra (1963) has developed fabrics with a very different look. The range of uses of her felts is wide and manifold: theatre clothing, shawls, fashion, carpets, cushions, hangings, bed covers, wall coverings.
After this first decade it is time to evaluate the results: the first book about her work was published in September, at the same time of a presentation of new work at the highly regarded design gallery Moss, about which a long article was published in the New York Times. The international interest is not a new phenomenon for Jongstra. With her company Nòt tom dick & harry she has been working on an international level almost from start on. This is a remarkable take-off for an independent designer. The question is why Jongstra’s work made such a speedy climb to the international top.

International in a flash

When the rising British Spanish fashion designer John Galliano ordered several yards of a black white felt pattern in 1996, Jongstra never had exhibited this work. Hardly anyone knew her work. On her own initiative she contacted the studio of the designer, because she thought he might be interested in her fabrics – she did not lack in ambition and empathy. Galliano is known for having a goods sense of quality and making use of anything that comes his way. He used the fabric almost without cutting it for a long coat in his winter collection 1996-1997. Although a fabric designer is rarely in the public eye, being used in a much talked about show was an asset in subsequent contacts. According to Jongstra many other fashion designers with whom she worked later on remembered the show and the coat very well.
Shortly after, orders followed from the American fashion designer Donna Karan (supply of fabrics for haute couture clothing), from Hella Jongerius (covering of the Kasese Chair which was presented under the Italian furniture brand Cappellini) and Volvo Cars (concepts for furniture covering) (Picture 1). Designer Eskandar used fabrics for the clothing line sold in his store in London and clothes by Jongstra herself were found at Egg in the same city. The supply of fabrics for a movie project generated the most publicity. The Jedi warriors in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, which opened in 1999 wore coats of Jongstra’s felt. Next fashion designer Christian Lacroix (known for his use of exuberant fabrics), the Metropolitan Opera of New York and several architects came knocking on her door. More about them later.
In museum circles people also quickly got interested on an international level. Het Nederlands Textielmuseum was the first one to purchase fabrics in 1997. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London soon followed – in 1998, 1999 and 2000 respectively.

Transformation

Claudy Jongstra had succeeded to turn a very traditional material with an old-fashioned image into a modern and desirable fashion fabric and to attract a lot of attention by doing so. I once made a comparison with the way in which the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake boosted accordion pleated fabrics. As from the eighties he made this type of fabric known on a large scale by his Pleats collections and was widely imitated. This is also true for Jongstra: almost anyone who makes smooth semi-transparent felts owes her.
Felt was mostly known as a coarse dense fabric which is used in particular for hats and slippers next to industrial applications. However, in Asia nomads have been making felt carpets and tents with brightly colored patterns for millennia. Carpets from the era 600-200 AC which were found in the Pazyryk graves in Siberia are known to experts as the oldest and most important ones preserved.
In western art industrially produced felt was provided with all kind of layers of meaning by Joseph Beus as from the sixties. He referred in particular to the use of grey felt in respect of the war (as coating for flasks, in boots, as blankets) and to the material as second protective skin for human beings. The artist Robert Morris explored in his work in more or less the same period the formal qualities of the industrial material. In the applied disciplines and free design this had little impact. The popularity which came about as from the eighties had more to do with tactility, color options and sculptural shapes.
Jongstra, who in the eighties was trained as fashion designer in Utrecht, fell for felt when she saw a Mongolian yurt in het Nederlands Textielmuseum. The tent had a pattern of laid-in colors. She did know this principle from pictures, but was overwhelmed by the material and the colors. Jongstra quickly mastered the process of felting and started – having quite a mind of her own and in plain contrast with her source of inspiration – to make fabrics in which wool was felted with silk fibers or was combined with transparent silk organza. In the mid-nineties this was unheard of. The results showed an intriguing combination of transparency and condensation, of elegance and rawness, of craft and mass production (Picture 2). References to these twin concepts are found in each article, this is the core of the fascination for her work.
The unexpected luxury image of felt also plays a part in this.

High-tech and low-tech

The latter contrast – craft and mass production – is a good example of the high-tech / low-tech tendency which has become a key factor in Dutch design as from the nineties. High-tech materials and/or technology are combined with low-tech counterparts. Sometimes the contrast is clearly visible, like in the Knotted Chair of Marcel Wanders where traditional knotting craft is combined with the modern material of aramid / carbon cord fixated with epoxy, thus allowing an ultra-light construction. In other cases the contrast is less visible. This goes inter alia for Jongstra’s work. There are, as already said, industrially manufacture felts, but the fabrics with a pattern or a more arty image have always been crafted. In the case of Jongstra the different fibers, combined with a woven fabric, or not, are laid by hand, but the actual felting is done by a robot. Felt is created by wetting and heating non-spun wool which opens the scales of the fibers. Through rubbing it with soap it is possible to hook the hairs into each other and a non-woven fabric comes about, a dense fabric which has not been woven, knitted, crocheted or plaited. Combination with other materials, such as silk fibers, linen and cotton is hard, because they are much smoother. Combining woolen felt with a woven fabric like organza is not obvious either. Nevertheless Jongstra succeeded in this and thus opened a world of new options. This while she already had increased the number of options in a major way by using all kind of hair types (of sheep, yaks, camels, goats, etc. etc.).
The robot who partly took over the labor-intensive production has been specifically designed for Jongstra to allow production of a higher yardage. For reasons of secrecy the device is kept a mystery. Hardly anyone has seen it. The high-tech nature of the method of production can only be guessed at upon seeing that there are dozens of yards of the same pattern available. By laying the patterns by hand there are always minor variations, anyway. As a rule the handcraft image dominates and this is in line with the revival of handcraft of these last years. What comes to mind in this is for instance the work of furniture designer Piet Hein Eek who works with wreck wood and Hella Jongerius who uses rough embroidery and intentional imperfections. Shortly before Jongstra started her career there was a lot of focus on ecological basic materials and production methods in the textile industry. As styling principle the clothing and home decoration fabrics made of natural materials in natural colors did not become a success with the public, but in the long term the ecological aspect as starting-point in a more disguised variation most definitely had an impact. The interest in Jongstra’s felt could be one of the reasons. Anyway, it strikes that in the same era, late eighties and early nineties, there were major developments in the use of synthetic fabrics. Their production appeared often to be more environmentally friendly than the production of natural materials like cotton, but the general public did not know this.
By the way, Jongstra does not have anything against industrial production. In the nineties she tried for instance to get a fabric of woolen felt with open silk strips in production with the Swiss leading company Schlaepfer. This failed at the time. It is not a self-chosen isolation outside the industrial world that drives her, it is a method which is the direct effect of the desired result.
Apart from the visual side the tactile element of the fabrics has also been attractive from start on: wonderfully soft and pliable. It was an important quality of the clothing fabrics Jongstra started with. The ingredients for the international success which I referred to, were already there: uniqueness, visual and tactile appeal, usability, spectacular achievements and a healthy portion of guts and ambition. There is also a special story and picture with it: the designer among her own sheep. A friend tends the flock of the special Drent moor sheep variety near the place in Friesland where Jongstra lives and works. Jongstra is an advocate of preservation of the rare long-haired sheep and uses their beautiful wool in her work. In this respect she holds the entire process of basic material to finished product in her own hands. Other basic materials – merino wool, yak hair, silk and the like – she purchases. In the story about the flock of sheep key notions are durability, nature and calm. The hectic business contacts with the international world are therefore mainly made from her studio in Amsterdam.

Fashion – Interior Design - Home Decoration

Almost at the same time of the discovery of her material Jongstra found her first working field due to an order for opera director David Prins. In the costumes she made in 1994 for his independent production of The Tempest of Purcell, her strength appear to lie essentially in the development of fabrics rather than in the design of clothing. After she tried nevertheless to get her own fashion label on the market, she acknowledged that this was inferior to the development of semi-finished products, in which she is really innovative. Several fashion designers were already mentioned who worked with the felts, but actual collaboration only came about with Alexander van Slobbe. In the mid-nineties Van Slobbe had an international break-through with his fashion label So. Several years ago Jongstra incidentally developed fabrics for his men and women collection. This concerned among others ecru fabrics with wide red or black stripes for jackets and suits. The clothing sold like hot cakes in exclusive fashion-stores like Kiki Niesten in Maastricht.
Once Van Slobbe sold this label in order to set himself free of the strangling rhythm of the confection industry, he revived his first label Orson + Bodil which had been sleeping for several years, in 2003. He established his workshop annex store Westergasfabriekterrein in Amsterdam, where he started to work on a small scale. As from this moment the collaboration with Claudy Jongstra had a permanent basis. The most recent fruits of this collaboration are the white felt jackets with a finishing in a traditional crochet technique (Picture 3a and 3b). Jongstra rediscovered the techniques by which vests and jabots (called guimpés) were finished when she studied the seventeenth century for another commission. Just like she did with felting, she quickly mastered this skill. Van Slobbe made extremely beautiful clothes of it. It is obvious that this cooperation is a very yielding one.
Although her roots are in fashion, home decoration also attracted Jongstra early in her career. In 1996 she wrote that she was ‘studying other uses, for instance in home decoration’.
For hangings, fabrics as decoration or division in a room, she could use the same type of fabrics as for fashion. Some years later she also started to make carpets and cushions. This required more dense felts, but this time made of wool of her own long-haired sheep, and as a result they remind of hides rather than of traditional felt fabrics (Picture 4). The funny thing is that the first felt carpets which were made thousands of years ago, probably were created as surrogate for hides. Coats of this type of material which she made around the year 2000 acquired a beautiful rough image – as if you’d put on a hide. A form of ecological fur, one might say. She asked the painter Marc Mulders of Tilburg to decorate some of these pieces of clothing and home decoration fabrics with his expressive figurative patterns. I did not think this was a success, but the search for new options and uses which is expressed by this is a red thread in the work of Jongstra and is precisely one of her strengths.
One of the most recent home decoration projects Jongstra works on concerns the new main building of the Public Library of Amsterdam on the Oosterdokseiland, which must be finished in 2007. This is the commission that made her take a plunge into the seventeenth century. On the initiative of the architect Jo Coenen textile is not the last item of interior design, but is involved in the planning from start on, a new step in the work of the textile designer. At present Jongstra develops a concept for the entrance area.
Two years ago she started to use felt as wall covering (stretched or hanging loose), an intermediate step in the development from home decoration accessory (pillow, carpet, hanging) to involvement in the development of the building. In the head-office of the Amsterdam building association het Oosten of Steven Holl, in the Utrecht Universiteits Medisch Centrum and in the restaurant of the Kunsthal of Rem Koolhaas Jongstra’s felt was not applied to the wall but after the building was finished (sometimes many years later, like the latter case) (Picture 5a and 5b). Qualities like sound muffling, a feeling of warmth and visual softening are elements in this. Slowly but gradually architects become convinced that it is good to include such uses in their reflection as from the beginning. For years Jongstra has someone working for her to effect such mentality change in architects. Next to Coenen the architects Claus and Kaan are also convinced of this working method. With them she works on the effectuation of a new cultural center in Nijverdal (city of Hellendoorn) where city-hall, theatre, library and café will be combined under the header Huis voor Cultuur en Bestuur. Architects firm MVRDV of Rotterdam involved Jongstra also from the beginning in the interior design of the Lloyd Hotel at the IJ in Amsterdam, which opened in 2004. However, this concerned a conversion and felt was used as coating fir a kind of shutters which can cover the windows of many meters high in the vide of the restaurant: still a bit more accessory than an actual component of the building (Picture 6).
The cherry flower pattern which Jongstra incorporated in the last project, represents a figurative element which has developed in her work since 2000. Initially it mainly concerned geometric patterns – like stripes, circles and checks – but in that year she presented in Milan next to her home decoration products a wedding-dress with a bird in a Japanese like style – a real eye-catcher. Upon working with figurative patterns one should take into account that during the production process the fabric shrinks by about 30%. It requires precision in ‘laying’ the various colored fibers and wool types. This method of figuration is much more compatible with the working method of Jongstra than having her fabrics painted by an artist. Although the eastern styling is almost generated by the production method of the felt, it would be interesting to see Jongstra develop a style more of her own in this.

Jongstra in the design field

Jongstra occupies a rather autonomous position in the design field. She does not belong anywhere and entirely goes her own way.
In the traditional world of felting artists and designers she even seems to be ignored. Due to this independent position she reminds somehow of Piet Hein Eek, to whom she feels indeed close. Once they had an exhibition together with several other designers (including Ineke Hans and Copray & Scholten) under the name Dutch Individuals, an initiative of Cok de Rooy, owner of design store The Frozen Fountain in Amsterdam. As the name already suggests, they were too individual and too much set on their own repute to continue this for a longer time. Although without any doubt Jongstra profited of the international interest which Droog Design has called up since 1993 for Dutch design, her success nevertheless stems from here own initiatives, as I already indicated. So far Jongstra had no involvement with Droog Design. There are not many Dutch designers of her generation who can say so. Recently she was invited for the first time by the group to cooperate in a project. The interesting element of the assignment is an expansion of Jongstra’s working field. It concerns in fact the corporate identity of a Chinese wool company and not the making of products in first instance.
Jongstra still feels at home in the field of textile design for her personal and artistic development – a phenomenon far from uncommon to textile designers. Being faithful to one medium is less and less common for young designers. They smoothly switch from one material to another, from one working or application field to another. Despite her faithfulness the horizon of Jongstra widens, not so much on her own initiative, but rather on that of others. Like the linoleum manufacturer Forbo, which recently asked her to join the conceptual process regarding a new type of linoleum.

The major development which the work of Jongstra went through this last decade, does not seem to come to an end for the time being. It will be a challenge for her to combine a broader working field with an extensive production and to keep providing the same quality. As from this year the American company Maharam Textiles distributes a special home decoration line (fabrics, carpets, pillows) among its customers in the project industry. A lot of orders would confront Studio Claudy Jongstra, as the company was renamed this year, with a luxury problem. This is the fate of any self-producing designer who produces work which is not easy to produce as mass-product. With this self-production she is part of an old tradition in the Netherlands which started in the seventies with designers like Bruno Ninaber van Eijben, Frans van Nieuwenborg and Martijn Wegman. Together with her business partner Marleen Engbersen, with whom she has been working since 1999 and her permanent staff members (some five persons) Jongstra will eventually have to find a solution to this luxury problem.

Jury Report

Amsterdam Arts Award 2005

The jury of the Amsterdam Arts Award 2005 consists of: Hans van Mierlo (chairman), Marie Hélène Cornips, Gerardjan Rijnders, Ester Apituley, Jan Blokker and Kristien Hemmerechts.

The Refined Wilderness of Claudy Jongstra

Where many artists focus on molding part of the reality, Claudy Jongstra does so to such an extent that she fully masters her own reality. In this she is a digger of raw material in nature, an alchemist who closely guards her recipes, an explorer of new forms, a designer, a supplier to an incidental fashion designer, a sculptor and a visionary artist, all in one. With her exploring mind she has built up a strikingly original and consistent oeuvre.

Claudy Jongstra (Roermond 1963) trained in the eighties at the Arts Academy in Utrecht (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) and gave the traditional material which felt is, a completely new image. By making combinations of wool, silk and other materials she knows how to effect an intriguing play of color, light, shadow, tactility, open and closed structures. Jongstra excels in working the field between applied art and autonomous art.

In an era where conceptual art is highly popular and many artists have their ideas carried out by others, Jongstra is a striking phenomenon with her perfected craft. Her work is the outcome of years of trying and research. The fleece of the Drent Heath sheep is her raw material and the new fabrics which she extracts from it are like silk, brocade, or robust pelt, used by her in wide varying spaces.

The way in which she uses her fabrics, shows a high level of conceptual sharpness. She comments on architecture, puts accents on spots in interiors and defines the focus in public space. She makes nature courser and more miraculous than it already is, and tips over set views on art.
In the restaurant of the Kunsthal in Rotterdam she covered the walls with a course black/white check pattern. From far it looks like a charcoal drawing. However, the closer one comes, the stronger the impression to be able to reach behind the white bars, until coming up close and recognizing the softness of wool. The specific lines in this space have something humoristic, and comment on the traditional art of drawing in a playful manner.
A carpet of wool and silk which she made for a house in Rotterdam is black through-and-through, like a fierce roughened scorch spot on a wooden floor. It is as if an animal as big as six horses was skinned for it. This carpet seems to want to escape from the limits of the archetype carpet. It is there as a warning.

In the work of Jongstra two forms and concepts of art coincide. Jongstra followed her interest in felt as basic material, reached a unique level in her craft and on top of that showed a high level of vision in applying this.

Thus she united two apparently separated worlds and upon looking at her work it is as if the refined craftswoman and the conceptual perfectionist share an amusing secret. Craft old-fashioned? Look how sturdy and impressing these objects are, they stand as a rock. However, these sculptures are made of fabric. Not of stone, not of glass, but of sheep. A living animal. The contradiction of warmth and softness on the one hand, and danger and roughness on the other hand, as we know this from nature, is united by Jongstra in her work. It reminds of a wilderness beyond our reach and tempts us by its pure hand-made beauty to enter into her conceptual wilderness. These diverging traces of imagination and sensitivity, of longing and repulsion, melancholy and soberness, can be experienced in the work of Jongstra time and again and make it into high and inimitable art.

By electing Claudy Jongstra for the Amsterdam Award the jury emphasizes that her designs represent a completely original and new chapter of this field of art has shown these last decades. Her many talents as imaginative and inventive designer can be read in the growing number of interventions in spaces of these last years: she embellished many interiors with her fabrics, curtains, wall coverings and three-dimensional installations, usually in buildings of renowned architects like Hoogstad, Koolhaas, MVRDV and Jo Coenen.
The jury praises this wide range of skills: her work is never boring or pale, but always thrilling and original to a high extent. Due to the refreshing manner in which Claudy Jongstra deals with her material she gave working with fabrics a positive impulse. The independent position she aspires is almost the one of a free artist. Almost, for she always keeps an open mind for the technical elements which are of crucial interest to the success of her products. Thus Claudy Jongstra takes a unique position in the international world of design.

Amsterdam, 22 January 2006