Aliki van der Kruijs | Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

ABOUT ALIKI VAN DER KRUIJS

Color photograph of a woman with long hair, looking directly at the camera, holding a bag in her hands while standing against a yellow background.

Aliki van der Kruijs (Dutch, born 1984) has a studio in The Hague, the Netherlands and works on self-initiated research projects, collaborations, and commissions. She received a bachelor’s degree in Fashion at ArtEZ University of Visual Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and her master’s degree in Applied Art at the Dirty Art Department of the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In one of her projects at the Sandberg Instituut, she juxtaposed her background in graphic design, photography, and fashion design with research into the way textiles can be a means of communication and a meaningful framework to highlight the relationship between humans and nature. In 2017 she had a three-month residency in Arita, Japan, to work with porcelain. She currently teaches Research and Design at the TXT department of the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTS

A tall rectangular color blanket shows a grid of blue tones, ranging from deep blue to very pale. Each square in the grid contains the marking of a raindrop. The blanket is labeled Custom Blue Color Chart 01 - Aliki van der Kruijs — In preparation for creating textile patterns using rainfall, Aliki van der Kruijs created this sample blanket that explores how digital printing inks respond to water before they are fixed with heat. A range of shades and tints are created as dye is lifted and deposited along the tide lines.

Three textiles pieces, each a different shade of blue, with waterdrops embedded into each textile. — Aliki van der Kruijs uses two techniques for drawing with rain on silk. In one, inked film is placed under the textile. As rain falls, ink seeps onto the surface of the textile, recording the raindrops. In the other, the textile is first printed with a layer of ink, which bleeds upon contact with the raindrops. The textile is silkscreened with the location, date, time interval, and millimeters of rainfall.

A model whose long dark hair obscures her face lifts above her head a navy blue scarf speckled with an irregular pattern created by raindrops. The sky behind her is gray and stormy.

Q&A with Aliki van der Kruijs, Designer

Aliki van der Kruijs is a Dutch designer who invented “pluviagraphy,” a technique with which she records the falling of raindrops on textiles and porcelain as part of an ongoing project titled Made by Rain. Made by Rain recently entered the permanent collection of Cooper Hewitt, following its inclusion in the exhibition Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design...

Posted By

Hannah Maureen Holden

Date

April 9, 2020