Alex Pillen is a fibre artist. She makes fabric that is delicate and light. With embroidery thread she creates ethereal structures. Since ancient times the word ether stood for the pure outer layer of our sky. Over time the meaning of the word expanded to include lightness, intangibility, and a sense of otherworldliness.  It is an otherworldliness Alex Pillen tries to make present as a fibre artist.

Her studio practice is influenced by Hilma af Klint’s art of seeing the invisible,  and Eva Hesse’s notion of drawing in space.  Our speech, emotions, our thought belong to a realm of the invisible, as do our afterlives. Working with embroidery thread on an industrial knitting machine allows Alex Pillen to make fabrics that give some visibility to this intangible realm.  The resulting  textile objects are abstract yet representational. They give shape to something immaterial. In Alex Pillen’s work the shadows are as important as the fabric.  The shadows accentuate the ethereal quality of a piece.

Alex Pillen combines art and science to select nuggets of reality for knitting. Decades of practice in philosophy and social science allow for fluid, intuitive transitions between text-based ideas and fibre art. For now, Alex Pillen enjoys a process-led phase, guided by ongoing experiments with thread and knitting techniques.  As she works with barely visible patterns in a translucent fabric, the word she keeps in mind is ‘to quiver’, to tremble with only a slight motion.