Behind the Design
Lincoln Center commissions art work for new visitor center

When Lincoln Center chose Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects to design its new visitor center—The Atrium at Lincoln Center—one aspect of the firm’s work that helds way with the selection committee was its dedication to the integration of ecologically sensitive and environmentally sustainable materials in their building designs.

This passion has taken architects Williams and Tsien to every corner of the world in search of distinctive, sustainable natural materials. In their travels they have also met and collaborated with like-minded artists, craftsmen, and designers such as award-winning textile artist, Claudy Jongstra. Late last year, Claudy Jongstra was invited to team with Williams and Tsien on the design of a monumental work of art for The Atrium at Lincoln Center.

Born in the Netherlands in 1963, Ms. Jongstra was trained as a fashion designer. She first came under the spell of felt in 1994 when she saw a Mongolian yurt on display in Nederlands Textielmuseum. The tent had a pattern of laid-in colors. She recognized the technique from pictures, but was overwhelmed by the material itself and the colors.

Jongstra quickly mastered the process of felting and started to make fabrics in which wool was felted with silk fibers or was combined with transparent silk organza. In the mid-nineteen nineties this was unheard of, but the process yielded a remarkable combination of transparency and density, of elegance and rawness, of craft and art.
Her tireless experimentation with felting techniques is motivated in part by her fascination for the traditional felt production as well as the durable and technical possibilities of wool. The result is an extraordinary range of textiles that are as rugged as they are refined.

Jongstra keeps the entire process from raw materials to end product in her own hands, so that she can operate independently and to be able to work sustainable. Jongstra tends her own flock of rare Drenthe Heath sheep, contributing to the survival of this age-old breed in the Netherlands and to the preservation of the natural landscape. Establishing her own dyeworks has made it possible for her to color her own products with natural dyestuffs rather than synthetic ones starting with madder, St. John’s Wort, and African marigold.
Since 2009 Jongstra also keeps her own hortus botanicus where national historic varieties of dye-plants grow. This garden operates as laboratory for the dyes, but at the same time it is a source of inspiration. By breeding plants that have often become obsolete, she contributes to preservation of heritage in this way too.

Since the mid-nineties, Jongstra’s textiles have been used in collections by leading fashion designers such as John Galliano, Donna Karen, and Christian Lacroix. In the late 1990s, the Jedi warriors in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace wore coats of Jongstra’s felt.

At present, her most important projects involve the embellishment of the interiors of buildings with wall coverings and rugs. She has designed wall hangings and installations for the Dutch government building, the Catshuis, the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, and the entrance to the Public Library in Amsterdam. She closely cooperates in this work with architects such as Jo Coenen, Claus en Kaan, and Rem Koolhaas. She recently was awarded the prestigious Dutch prize for applied arts and architecture: The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfondsprijs.
At Lincoln Center, Jongstra is working in close collaboration with architect Tod Williams on the design of a 97-foot fabric installaton made of felted wool and silk in a palette of gold and gray. The wall covering spans a second-story surface inside the new Atrium at Lincoln Center. As with other large-scale fabric installations by Jongstra, the fabric takes on a painterly quality when viewed from below or from a distance. Captivating and decorative, Jongstra’s felt wall will also bring a feeling of warmth and visual softening to the double-heighted public space. As with other works created by Jongstra for public buildings, the felt also helps muffle sound and enhance acoustical balance. This is an especially important feature in the new visitor center where live performances will be offered free to the public each week. Lincoln Center is the first university building which has been acknowledged as “green” building by LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).
Claudy Jongstra has succeeded in turning a very traditional material with an old-fashioned image into a modern and desirable fabric and, in doing so, she has attracted the attention of major museums around the world. Her work is included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, New York; The RISD Museum, Rhode Island; and Fries Museum, Leeuwarden.

Painting with fiber
Interview with felt artist Claudy Jongstra
het Financieele Dagblad – February 28, 2009
by Brenda van Osch

A small farm in Spannum, a small village in the north of the Netherlands (Friesland). In the backroom the soft whistle of a gas burner can be heard. An enormous steel pot is on the fire. The strands of wool hanging on the walls have the most incredible colors: yellow with a tinge of gold, orange like berries on a bush in autumn, deep coral red, tending towards brown. Claudy Jongstra lifts the lid of the pot, gets a stick and slowly stirs with a ladling movement. The wool coming from her own flock of Drenthe Heath sheep, is colored blood red.
‘By the root of weld’, she explains. ‘Did you know that the Netherlands exported this plant in the 17th century all over the world? Now we hardly see this color anymore in our living environment, at the most in an old painting in a museum. Such a crying shame. Look how beautiful the color shading is. This effect cannot be achieved with synthetic dye, for synthetic dye always is of uniform tone.’
For felt artist Jongstra (46) wool is the basis of her existence. ‘Wool, water and friction, these are the ingredients of felt. The wool fiber has scales. If you add water and rub it, then they will inextricably catch into each other. That is felt. Isn’t it great?’
This principle Jongstra has thoroughly explored these last fifteen years. She coarsened felt technology by adding other types of wool and spun threads, but also refined it to a level whereat her fabrics are transparent and feel silky soft. The wool she mixed with camel hair, linen, patent-strong yarn, silk, but also artificial fibers. Together with the technical research institute TNO she developed wall-paper consisting of felt with laminate. In Jongstra’s work felt can look like sheepskin, but also like parchment.
Wool is wonderful, she says, the most intelligent fiber in the world. It is heat insulating, dirt-resistant, elastic, smell absorbing – and she could go on naming some twenty more qualities. ‘Nobody has ever succeeded in imitating a fiber of such quality synthetically.’

She leads the way to the room where Studio Claudy Jongstra, as the enterprise is officially called, keeps office. Two large hangings of felt hang on the wall, silvery white with coarse flowers cut out in layers of the felt and laid in with wool in – undeniably – weld red. Jongstra grabs a corner of the hanging: ‘Feel!’ It is allowed, no even, compulsory to touch her works of art. ‘Felt is an experience. It changes people. I think this is because we recognize it at some kind of primitive level. Wool is so close to humans. Our first clothes were made of wool, our first tent, the yurt, was made of wool.’
Holding the felt it is easy to see how meticulously each layer and each small thread of wool has been assigned its place in the fabric. Layer by layer the hangings are built up, upside-down and in mirror-image, the rubbing is carried out on the backside.
‘Sometimes a work consists of over fifteen layers, then you can only see as far as layer five shining through.’
Jongstra takes some five steps back and squeezes her eyes. She pauses and asks rhetorically: ‘Can you see that the left hanging is okay and the right hanging is not? These hangings are intended for the boardroom of Baarsma Wine Group. Wine wholesalers. A men’s world. The hanging at the right is much too sweet, it lacks excitement.’
Like a painter she makes studies which result into the final hangings. ‘We make sketches and small cloths, but only on actual scale it comes to life. I hang out everything widely. Often I need weeks to study it: does it have enough richness, enough movement, the right moment of tension? How does it come across in different types of light and light incidences? Sometimes we remake the cloths four, five times before I am satisfied. It is like painting with fibers.’
She demands time from her commissioners and herself to optimize her works to perfection. ‘If I make a work and I think that it still needs hand-spun silken threads, then this simply has to be done. The work asks for it. The rare occasion that we carried out commissions under pressure, you can tell by the result. We have made a pact: we won’t do that anymore. Only an A+ is good enough for me. Everything I want to say, I say in the felt. The story must be right.’
This commitment has yielded recognition. Her work hangs inter alia in the government building the Catshuis, the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, and in the Public Library in Amsterdam, and in major museums like the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition “Mapping out Paradise”, a series of free work made together with the painter and glass artist Marc Mulders, will travel later this year to the new museum by Rem Koolhaas in Guangzhou, China. As from 6 March a felt installation by Jongstra will be part of the exhibition “Fashioning Felt” in the design museum Cooper-Hewitt in New York.
On November 25, last, she was awarded the Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds Prijs for Applied Arts and Architecture. She was proud, but also a bit frightened. ‘I thought: Oh, my god, not yet. It is an oeuvre award and I still have to do so much!’ Thus she is still at the beginning of working three-dimensionally. ‘My installation for the Cooper-Hewitt is the first three-dimensional work. People can actually step into the world of felt. This is a start. First I have mastered the felt, then I added color and now I can start sculpting with it. I can make sculptures of felt.’
Does the growing interest in durable products explain her success? She doubts it. However, it is a fact that the time is ripe. ‘We were pioneers and now time has caught up with us. That is how I see it.’ She noticed this recently in Paris, where she was on a customer acquisition trip with her right-hand Marleen. ‘We have been coming to Paris for years, to see architects and designers, but it was always hard to do business. They found my work too rough, everything slightly hairy was scary.’ She giggles. ‘This time we were very warmly welcomed. Everybody now has an open mind for new materials.’

After her secondary schooling Jongstra went to the school of fashion at the Kunstacademie in Utrecht. In 1989 she graduates cum laude and becomes a fashion designer, first with her own label Not Tom, Dick & Harry, later with a clothing company. The scales fell from her eyes at a fabrics fair in Paris, she tells us. ‘I saw the bulk, the halls full of fabrics. Six months later: again such bulk. It looked a little bit different, okay, but I hated the excess. Greed being promoted to such extent in people, it made me really sick. I could not do the work anymore.’
It still gets her heated: ‘I don’t understand why people don’t wear their clothes anymore until they are worn, why they don’t repair them. Everything being interchangeable, their buying a new top for 10 Euros tomorrow. I believe that this is because they no longer feel connected with the material or the maker.’
When she saw a hand-made felt Mongolian nomad tent in the Textielmuseum in Tilburg, that’s when she saw the light. ‘I thought: this is something that has survived through the ages. What an amazing material!’ She enlists in a felting course at the museum. To be astonished next: for centuries felt has been looking the same. Always, everywhere. ‘I could not believe that people never tried something different with it. I almost exploded of energy to start experimenting.’
She quits her job and buys herself artistic freedom by taking on cleaning jobs at night. For a year she dedicated every minute to felting, made stacks of small fabric samples. ‘Until I thought: what I’m making now, I’ve never seen before.’ She asks a small group of persons form the museum world to come and have a look. They are impressed and they buy work from her. ‘Then I knew: this is really good, I will continue. And I never changed my mind again.’
Fifteen years later her empire covers a large part of a dead-end street in Spannum. The newest acquisition is the small farm where the office and dye-room are housed. Next to it there is a piece of fallow land. With the 50,000 Euros associated with the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Award Jongstra’s partner Claudia will lay out a garden with rare indigenous dye-plants. It will be an experimental garden for teaching and inspiration. Next to the garden to be there is the house they live in and a workshop where guests are received. The actual production takes place in a shed at the end of the street. That is where the wool is carded and felted and the hangings are created, layer by layer. She has gathered a great team around her, Jongstra tells us. Seven persons who have also given their heart to felt and made the signature of the “Jongstra school” their own. ‘In the spinning of the wool, laying of the felt, you will see the hand of the maker in it, this is very important.’
In the course of time they have developed their own parlance. ‘If I say that the silk should be laid in a growing pattern, everybody here knows what I mean.’ For each work the process of making is described and drawn, for after two years it is also hard for them to trace back every fiber of a fabric. The archive meanwhile covers hundreds of recipes. However, recorded or not, Jongstra will never contract out the production. ‘Impossible, we would lose the signature’. Likewise she will never import wool, if her own flock does not produce enough. ‘Out of stock, is out of stock, then they have to wait till next year.’
Ten years ago she moved from Amsterdam to Friesland. She has a lot to thank the Frisians for, she says. ‘They are constructive, participate in the thinking process. If I ask my neighbor, the carpenter, tomorrow to put something together for me, then he will, without asking why.’ She was met with the same benevolence at the Provinciehuis (regional authorities) when she asked them for financial support to start up her dye works. ‘Nobody thought it a strange plan. It was also expediently arranged. They have contributed 100,000 Euros. This flow of cooperation, it is lovely.’

She wants more than just making beautiful things, she wants to touch people, even have an impact on them. Jongstra: ‘I have a mission, yes. With my work I want to appeal to feelings which have been snowed under in most people and which I find it important to release again. The tactile nature of my work, the materials, the colors – all this incites the senses in a way we are not used to anymore. I hope to peel off some layers in people, to take away their hard shell, to soften them.’
In practice? The commissions she gets from companies to dress up rooms, like this last year the head-office of the Triodos Bank and recently the board-room of DSM. ‘They are important rooms, where important decisions are taken. My work changes the atmosphere, this will have an impact.’
Another example: the elevators of the World Trade Centre at Schiphol, which they have developed a prototype for. The elevator is dressed from bottom to top with a skin of felt. ‘When you enter the elevator, you lose every reference. This has an alienating effect, it calls up something in people. They want to touch it, talk about it with their neighbors. Precisely in a place like that, where everything is about moving fast and making money, I want to offer people a moment where things stand still. So they will feel, yes, there is another way.’
She finds it important to tell the story behind the dye-plants also, the healing powers they have. Weld having been woven by women in the old fisher village Urk through their underwear, because it helps against rheumatism and gaunt. ‘This knowledge is our heritage.’ She used the plant inter alia in the walls of the waiting room for radio therapy in the hospital Universitair Medisch Centrum Utrecht. ‘When waiting there for treatment it is nice to be surrounded by nature. I think it is comforting.’
However, she is not an activist, Jongstra stresses. She likes glitter and glamour, the red carpet at the opening of an exhibition. Her wall hangings and carpets she sells to private collectors in Milan, New York, Beverly Hills. Soon she will decorate a yacht. ‘I don’t want to be demonstrative, I don’t believe in that. I want to surprise people, to get something going. The message will get across by itself when people are ready for it.

Award winning Claudy Jongstra at Cooper Hewitt Museum

New York, February 2009. Claudy Jongstra has strong ties with the raw materials she works with. She raises her own Drenthe Heath sheep and grows her own dye plants. Both in her life and work she implements an overall sense of ethical and ecological awareness. For example, her sheep are not just kept for their wool, but they are also used for landscape preservation. As a designer Claudy Jongstra holds a unique position. She is fascinated by felt and for thirteen years she has been engaged in the processing of felted wool which she enriches and colors with other materials. Thus she designed a.o. the wall hangings and installations for the Dutch government building the Catshuis, the Dutch Embassy in Berlin and the entrance of the Public Library in Amsterdam. She closely cooperates in this with architects like Jo Coenen, Claus en Kaan architects and Rem Koolhaas. She also designs fabrics for famous fashion designers like John Galliano, Christian Lacroix and Alexander van Slobbe. Together with her dedicated team she has turned felt into a contemporary material. Endurance, ethics, nature, innovation are the main principles underlying her work. Recently she was awarded the prestigious Dutch prize for applied arts and architecture: The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfondsprijs. The Fashioning Felt exhibition opens on March 6th, 2009 at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York. For this exhibition Claudy Jongstra has made an experience installation, called ‘Inner Mood’. On the basis of the wooden frame designed by Toshiko Mori Architects, she has created a walk-in installation in which visitors can experience the powerful emotions called up by the felt design. Composed of different textures, colors and materials the feeling is one of being closed off from the world and being immersed in a different total experience. Beautiful hand-spun threads of silk and wool interlude with the smoothness of the felt. The rawness of the wool of her own sheep, the Drenthe Heath sheep, brings movement in the felt and creates a sensation; a visual, tactile and emotional experience. For the colors in her installation she used Rubia Tinctora, also called madder, combined with St. John’s Wort, a plant historically known for the treatment of melancholia. The first one is a typical Dutch plant the root of which has been used for ages to extract a natural red dye. It is a forceful red, a so-called grand teint. The second one is a so-called petit teint, drawn from its leaves. They have also been chosen for their medicinal qualities. Any natural dye plant has its own characteristics and history. Choosing a specific natural dye involves not merely the selection of a particular color, but implements at the same time the entire history of (the uses of) such plant and its other qualities. That is why a natural dye is so much more than a chemical dye. The choice of madder is also made to protect and resuscitate an element of Dutch cultural heritage. Another element which Claudy Jongstra is strongly committed to. As a natural dye madder has been used for centuries in the Netherlands. In the 14th century Dutch madder was known for its top quality and had become an important export product. St. John’s Wort has been used as early as by the ancient Greeks to cast away evil spirits and to heal wounds. By using it as a natural dye its enlightening effect is intrinsic in the installation and will exude from it.

Link to Dutch Television News http://www.surfmedia.nl/app/video/144174/play?format_id=213218&cl.wmv&mode=url

Claudy Jongstra krijgt Cultuurfondsprijs voor Toegepaste Kunst en Bouwkunst

Amsterdam, 15 september 2008. De Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prijs voor Toegepaste Kunst en Bouwkunst 2008 is toegekend aan stofontwerper Claudy Jongstra. De prijs bedraagt € 50.000 en wordt 25 november uitgereikt in het Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam.

Claudy Jongstra (Roermond, 1963) uit Spannum (Fr.) studeerde cum laude af aan de Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht, richting modevormgeving. Zij ontwerpt stoffen voor bekende internationale modeontwerpers als de Engels-Spaanse John Galliano, de Amerikaanse Donna Karan, de Engels-Iranese Eskandar Nabavi en de Franse Christian Lacroix. Met de Nederlandse modeontwerper Alexander van Slobbe (die in 2003 deze Cultuurfondsprijs kreeg) werkt zij geregeld samen.

Als stofontwerper neemt Claudy Jongstra in Nederland een unieke plaats in. Zij is gefascineerd door vilt en houdt zich al bijna vijftien jaar bezig met de verwerking van vervilte wol, die zij met andere materialen verrijkt en kleur geeft. Zo heeft Claudy Jongstra o.a. de wandtapijten en wandinstallaties ontworpen voor het Catshuis, de Nederlandse ambassade in Berlijn, het huis voor Cultuur en Bestuur te Nijverdal en onlangs de entree van de Openbare Bibliotheek in Amsterdam. Daarbij werkt zij nauw samen met architecten als Jo Coenen, en Claus en Kaan Architecten. De eeuwenoude, traditionele wol is op deze wijze weer helemaal van deze tijd geworden. Jongstra's interesse in wol en kleur gaat zo ver dat zij voor eigen gebruik beschikt over een kudde van 200 Drentse heideschapen en haar eigen plantaardige ververij is begonnen.

Claudy Jongstra werd eerder onderscheiden met de Materiaalfondsprijs voor innovatief materiaalgebruik (1995), de Aanmoedigingsprijs Industrieel Ontwerp (2000), de Vredeman de Vries Prijs voor vormgeving en de Amsterdamprijs voor de Kunsten 2005.

De jury van de Prijs voor Toegepaste Kunst en Bouwkunst 2008 prijst de volstrekt onafhankelijke, autonome koers die Jongstra volgt, zonder ook maar enige concessie te doen aan haar opdrachtgevers. De jury bestond uit Titus Eliëns (voorzitter), Bernard Hulsman en Timo de Rijk.

 

 

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