Wednesday, 14 September 2011 by Irene Hoofs

I hope this post will bring you just as much relaxation as it did for me... they say 'water' can do that to a person.... Driven by their fascination with water, Dutch designers Maarten Kolk & Guus Kusters created Waterloop (= Flow of Water) for the Audax Textielmuseum Tilburg in the Netherlands.

Maarten and Guus acknowledge that while textiles and water don’t seem to have too much in common, they are undoubtedly connected, as the textile industry is one of the biggest polluters of water in the world. For this reason, the designers didn’t just portray water in their collection, but developed production methods that spare as much water as possible.

Using digital printing – which produces little waste compared to conventional rotary printing – Kolk and Kusters employed a technique where the material is dyed directly with ink, which gives a different result on each type of yarn. They then tried to enlarge the surface of the print by adding very little water to the production process. The combination of material, weave and the process of adding water resulted in unique effects on the textiles.

Photographs of water became the prints in the Waterloop series. The duo went to Iceland to photograph glaciers, geothermal spas, geysers, rivers, waterfalls, fjords, oceans and lakes. The research has resulted in a series of textiles which includes a table cloth, grand foulard, tea towels, autonomous objects and a rug.