Kiss Katalin

“When walking around the factory, long meters of furniture and clothing wool fabrics are coming down from the weaving machinery, all designed by me. On the streets, people wear the clothes, to which the materials were born in my mind. Indescribable feeling.

At that time I could keep my artistic authority. However, our dealers always came with foreign rags and tatters, our textile engineers could make a perfect technical adaptation…” For the Baja Fine Broadcloth Factory, she designed alone for a long time. As a just graduated! She was one of the 13 designers at the Home Textiles Company.

She needed to deal with those foreign rags as well. Jacquard machines were operated there; these punch card controlled looms were able to weave almost any pattern. Nowadays these are governed by computers. But, the 1990 economic transition swept out the whole Hungarian textile industry. “Nobody even knows where the looms now.. Just before we became unnecessary, an American woman came and asked some patterns rooted in the Hungarian culture. I designed a collection based upon the motifs of the Matthias Church wall-paintings.”

It is hot in the garden. We undertake the risk of sunstroke only to see the silvers and blues of the icicles in the “Winter Garden”. She took five years to work out the many small details.

Returned from Strasbourg, the tapestry is laughing as a water surface. A large-size tapestry “Lights of Europe” was exhibited at the Strasbourg headquarters of the Europe Council. 15 Hungarian creative artists had the opportunity to exhibit 15 small-size objects.

At textile artists, generally, skeins and balls occupy all of the places around. But here embroideries of our mothers and grandmothers are on the walls: the hangings. “I acquired them by free gifts. These are funny parts of our culture, of naïve drawings and clumsy verses.”

Why not rework this topic by new approach? And why not be the central figure a unicorn? The unicorn is an iconic figure now, even if it is not visible, it is there.

Canvas – car cover – road – journey – a great travel: and where is the unicorn? The title leads us not only the world of hangings. “Many do not understand… An art action was organised by the Textile Museum. You could apply with objects made of old covers. I selected a black tarpaulin. I suffered a lot with the holes. Could you see the old-fashioned railway car on it? The message will come from your fantasy…”

“My tapestries depict landscapes. I simplify it until the pure effect of the landscape beauty can be observed, regardless the picture, and until it is clear that this is a textile.

Her small pictures are almost sculptures, the masks depict characters. An instructive story can be connected to a woman with impaired conscience. A U-shaped carpet was ordered around an opulent, four-poster bed of Renaissance style. No carpet needed below the bed, but this had to be invisible. For practical reasons! Said the (crazy) hookum, to make the cleaning easier below the bed. They were not allowed even to meet the customer. It is rumoured that the dogs destroyed the hand-woven wool carpets within two years, and the customer moved out. They did not receive an order for the new place.

6/7/2011 Budapest

Elérhetőség: mutermek@mutermek.hu