Astrid Krogh Weaving with light By Tine Nygaard		Astrid Krogh’s decorations are incontrovertible. They are large, shining kaleidoscopic compositions combining artificial light, daylight and industrial materials. The decorations unpretentiously and directly realize the idea that bears them: the mutability of the patterns that arise in the combination of light and textiles. Astrid Krogh trained at the Danish Design School. Her point of departure has always been her love of textiles and textile principles, so although she now works with an unlimited field of materials it is her identity as a textile craft artist that structures her approach to the jobs. At present she is working to realize a decoration for the Danish Parliament (the Folketing): a neon tapestry. Her studio reflects the process. The neon tubes lean luminously against a wall: 14 different colours mix diffusely with one another on the white surface. Astrid Krogh is still considering whether the ground of the tapestry should be white, so that the colours will mix as they do on the wall, or whether it should be darker and absorb the light, so that the lines of the tubes will be contoured more sharply against the background. Nor has she made a final decision on the colour scheme yet: first the composition has to stand the test in the form of a 1:1 sketch. The paper lies stretched out, waiting, provocatively empty on the floor. The format is 2.4 x 7 metres.The windows are full of perforated, colourful material samples which the strong sunlight casts on the light floor of the studio in strong colours. The effect is almost sacral, like the stained glass in a cathedral. On a table stands a model of the place where the neon tapestry is to hang: a long dark-purplish passage with a grey carpet and white doors. There is no other decoration. Astrid Krogh’s neon tapestry is to illuminate the blue passage and its users in more than one sense: as a textile work and as light. In the model one sees the small sketches for the neon tapestry, ten in all. There are ten because Astrid Krogh is working with ten compositions of shining neon tubes that can be combined infinitely. She has not yet decided which compositions are to be switched on at the same time, nor has she decided at what intervals the tapestry is to change appearance; but it is of quite fundamental importance to her that the tapestry is to be a dynamic, changing decoration. The motif is geometrical and ornamental, consisting of fragments of circles and lines. The circles and lines are structured systems, which because of their very stringency can tolerate being broken up into fragments without the big picture disappearing. The effect recalls the ornamental duplications of the kaleidoscope. Astrid Krogh drew her inspiration for the neon tapestry from the lobby of the Danish Parliament, where Rasmus Larsen decorated 268 metres of wall with apparently systematic ornamentation in the years 1918-1921. But if you look more closely, anarchy lurks just beneath the surface; the organic ornamentation is very rich in variations. It is the deviations and displacements in the overall pattern that inspire Astrid Krogh. She always tries to find the essence of a space when she works with a decoration; to find the mood of the place and its original proportions, both architecto-nically and iconographically. Sense of space One very successful example of her way of working is a decoration of the assembly hall of the Danish Rail headquarters, which she did in collaboration with her colleague Puk Lippmann in 2001. The space is centrally placed in the impressive building from the mid-eighteenth century. It has slender mansion-like windows, hand-carved radiator screens and profiled panels which divide it into bays framed by golden mouldings. On the ceiling is Stefan Viggo Pedersen’s decorative painting from 1947-49. It shows a bathing facility with beautiful naked summer girls. You see them from under the water, and high above their heads you see a train speeding across the Little Belt Bridge. Astrid Krogh and Puk Lippmann’s contribution to the space is a total but considerate decoration which duplicates the elements of the space itself and in an abstract sense elaborates on the story of the bathing nymphs. The tapestry repeats a circle pattern from the radiator screens in light blue and beige sand colours, which give the impression of a sea bed in shimmering summer light. The bays of the wall are surfaces with plaster coloured in delicate pastel shades. It is highly sophisticated: only when you have been in the room for some time do the pastel colours emerge as restful pauses for the eyes in the classical interior. On two opposite walls hang three metal tapestries – woven from steel. Behind the weave, white neon tubes brighten up the material and intensify the inherent pattern with which the industrial material was born. The patterns change when you walk past them or tilt your head. They also change with the changes in daylight, as do the pastel-coloured wall bays. Material with no limits Patterns are the focal point of Astrid Krogh’s output. One of her sources of inspiration is nature. Many of the structures of nature – for example in bark, leaves and water – have a patterned character; patterns, that is, which despite immediate recognizability always have a wealth of variations. They are unlimited and unpredictable. Astrid Krogh has worked in the traditional ways with materials and patterns with the ‘repeat’ technique: pattern units that are repeated serially in print or in a textile weave. The wish to break down the boundaries of the repeat pattern and also to expand her field of work prompted Astrid Krogh – back when she was studying at the Danish Design School – to search out the potential of other materials than wool, silk and cotton. It was a professional revelation for her to visit the Tech Textile trade fair in Frankfurt. There she saw materials which were in principle produced with textile methods – woven, matted and dyed – but the materials included steel tubes, fibre-glass and acrylic. These materials have unintentional patterns, many of them anarchistic and changeable. One example is swaths of woven steel wire that constantly change their patterns because the steel reflects the light. Another example is oil filters which are made by injecting acrylic fibres on to a flat surface and hardening them. This produces an unpredictable white pattern that recalls lace. Astrid Krogh has experimented with cratefuls of these materials; she has perforated, coloured, woven and combined them. She is particularly interested in the optical experience we can have when light and materials affect each other. Her works change unpre-dictably when you move in front of them, when the daylight strikes them in different ways in the course of the day, when the artificial lighting is switched on, and when she includes artificial light directly as a material. Daylight is extremely unpredictable, so the incorporation of light in the form of optical fibres and neon tubes stems from a wish to work directly with the light sources. The neon tubes, which become the material in Astrid Krogh’s tapestry for the Danish Parliament, started out in her work as a means of underscoring the qualities of another material. The inherent patterns in the metal tapestries in the Danish Rail assembly hall and a metal weave at Mærsk Data are emphasized by vertical fluorescent tubes from the back. In an exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Art in 2002 Astrid Krogh twisted the neon tubes into the “Holbein Tapestry”, the tapestry that prompted the Parliament architects to contact her. In this case the neon tubes become the primary material. They do not underscore a pattern, but are a pattern; precisely the kind of pattern that, in a simple timed computerized combination, can change so that the changeability becomes the point.