About the Danish artist Solvejg Refslund (1947 - )
…there was a
little girl called Solvejg in the southernmost part of Denmark. When she was small, she
was inventive and curious by nature, and this caracteristic remained until she one day was
a grown up woman. She met Anders, and together they travelled far, far north to Greenland
where it's both cold and beautiful. Solvejg was still creative, and she sewed and made
drawings whenever she had time left over from her family and her teaching.
Back home in Denmark she continued experimenting into her world of pictures by the
sewing machine, putting paint on cotton and later fixating this in an oven before cutting
it into shapes and figures of people, animals and abstractions. Both the human mind as
well as the world outside came close to her thoughts while working and soon she had made
many large and small pieces of textile art. The more she sewed, the greater was the demand
for exhibitions and sales.
One day Solvejg said to herself that she wanted to make her own paper. She immediately
started collecting plants and strange things at home in Helnaes, south of the island Fyn
where she and Anders had now settled and where she had opened a gallery and a studio. A
machine mixing the fibres she needed for paperproduction was installed. Sometimes she
added straws, flowers, tealeaves and yarn, and she always included the abeca bananafibres
as a matrix in this handmade paper. As soon as it all dried, she would make oilpaintings
on them, and occasionally this wet paper would be made into sculptural shapes too.
Solvejg still works this way, and lives happpily ever after doing workshops and
exhibitions at home and abroad…
Visit her yourself on www.refslund.dk
