Sunshine through lace – Anda Klancic’s delicate touch
Balkan Fibre Art colony introduced to me one more beautiful textile artist, Anda Klancic, the master of bright light and thin fibers. Anda’s work is first of all about delicacy and gentleness, which result after a hard and long hand labor.
People usually say that dog owners start to look like their dogs if they spend enough time together; well, the same thought comes to your mind after a few moments of looking at Anda and her lace/embroidery work, transparent sculpture or fine jewelry. Optimism, joy, contemplation, peacefulness…
Embraced by Nature
Since I spent 9 days sharing the room and the atelier with her, I had a chance of seeing the artist incorporating her inner self into the work that is being remodeled and rethought to the smallest detail. Extracts of nature, like leaves, waves, water drops, flowers often trigger creative process that will most probably end incorporating ideas about life, emotions, beauty, eternality… For example, she collected 700 chestnuts, covered them with wool and used for her installation as particles of human body; body as part of nature, but also as a structure composed of small material parts.
Embraced by nature, detail
Each of her works takes months to be completed, using only needle, thread, yarn, wool and skills of fingers; but the same minute and patient process is simultaneously happening inside her head, putting all the metaphors and senses in the right place.
Global hand to hand, all around, detail
Anda Klancic started off as a fashion designer, but soon found out that industry is not a right place of expressing honesty, emotions and senses through suggestive objects. So, she finished her MA at the Academy of fine arts, entered the artistic world and by now exhibited in many international galleries and won some really prestigious awards: Kreinik Award – Art of the Stitch, London, England; ITF Excellence Award – 6th International Textile Competition, Kyoto, Japan.
Recycled shells
Through her work you can simultaneously enjoy in profound aesthetic of very subtle stitches of yarn and thread, but in a narrative form you immerse yourself into stories of human-nature relationships, global communication, mythology and religion. Behind/beside the perfect light, the seductive fragility of technique, there is always a deep meaning and the interplay of associations that entwine you in the fibers.
Global hand to hand, all around
Maybe the best example of this psycho-emotional involvement is her site-specific exhibition called Thoughts, organized in the monastery in Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia. In 8 rooms of the lapidary in this old monastery Anda constructed a series of artistic associations of different thoughts. First five rooms are interconnected and filled with differently colored ribbons that form complex compositions: you start with wise thoughts (blue), go through real thoughts (brown), bright thoughts (yellow), dark thoughts (black) to end with the undulation of thoughts. Multisensitive experience, accentuated by specific music and smells, climaxes with the light object Aura – the symbol of life, but at the end Memento mori warns you about what inevitably comes.
Aura
Captured wave is the light-motive of many of her artworks and jewelry. Materiality is always fragile and gentle, but the message it caries is strong, like the heaviness of life is being transposed into soul-like objects. We called Anda the sunshine of our BFA colony; not only for her everlasting smile, but for her energy that is strongly present in her art.
(Ivana Podnar is guest blogger on Personal Cyber Botanica…)