Lina Sofia Lundin

Residency Period: January 2018
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Lina Sofia is a textile artist whose who is researching about natural dyeing technique. Interested in recovering ancient knowledge from everywhere she goes, her research has many aims that goes beyond getting and applying this knowledge.

After having lived in Stockholm for many years, she became aware of the loss of social bonds in the urban life. Former communities were built on interdependency and in small societies people of different profiles and ages came together for many different reasons. The slow times and also the necessities of a preindustrial era allowed to share hours of crafting together, talking to each other, and building affective relationships. Lina Sofia uses the research of the dyeing techniques to create new communities based on exchanging non academic knowledge and collaborative creation.

Dyeing with natural elements also connects us with unused organic material and with nature, a nature that used to mark the life rhythm, made us conscious that sources are limited, the cycles of life and the need of one another.

BIO

Lina Sofia has a BA degree in Textile Art from the Academy of Art and Craft in Gothenburg, studied Ethnology at the University in Stockholm and is an educated Craft Tutor from Nyckelviksskolan.

Lina Sofia is a textile artist who investigates art processes in relationship to a place, material and knowledge. She is based in the countryside of Sweden where she explores natural dyes, cultivating dye plants and natural fibers. While working she is incorporating local skills from the community by including neighbours, old and new friends in the activities around cultivating and crafting. She is trying to find out how information transforms itself from theory to knowledge and how it can be embodied. The social platforms she builds is an essential part in her projects.

The natural dyeing techniques have for a long time had a history of keeping expert skills as secrets. Lina Sofia wanted to open up the field which led her to teaching and lecturing in the subject, also the publications The Dyeing Manifest – The Expanded Field of Composting 2013, Natural Dyes 2014 and 2017.

 Between 2009-2016 Lina Sofia investigated collaborative consumption through a shared wardrobe in a shape of a clothes library. The project dealt with issues around mending, life span of garments, ecology, human behaviour and also created a space for new ideas to be born within the circularity of materials. It was located in the suburb of Stockholm and had 360 members.

Since 2016 she is working for the Swedish Public Art Agency in a residential area in a nearby city with a great diversity of residents. Cooking, textiles and dyeing with spices and plants have been the starting point for dialogues between the residents about public spaces and an investigation on how they can connect with the context.