‘Wool has about 20 qualities, and nothing has ever succeeded in imitating that chemically or synthetically. Wool does not burn. It is anti-bacterial. It is elastic. It can absorb moisture. That's why you can use it at hospital. I could go on endlessly. Wool is actually pretty genius.’ It's the Night of Arts and Sciences. The auditorium at the Groninger Museum is two-thirds full. Everyone is listening in dead silence to what Claudy Jongstra, felt artist, has to say. It’s a story of earth, alchemy and craft.
She talks fast, as if she wants to unload as much information as possible in the half hour allotted for this lecture. While talking, she guides us through the 72 images in her slide presentation. They’re all beautiful photos of her work and her materials. Although she would probably say ‘our materials’ herself, because she constantly speaks in terms of ‘we’.
‘These are onion skins. When you dye with them, you get the most incredible gold. It’s almost overwhelming. Every day we’re at that dye works and you still can’t believe what you’re looking at. We are still doing a lot of research into paint as well, and colours occur that don’t have names yet. This is because they are also no longer in our surroundings. Actually, with the disappearance of plant colours, language has also atrophied, so the words for those colours no longer exist. We often call it ‘onion’, but that’s just the plant, or this is the dyer’s madder, for that kind of red. But it's not actually red or yellow either: it's the sun.’
In all her words, Jongstra's passion comes through. Modesty is not her thing: ‘This is a beautiful work,’ she says of a photograph, or ‘this works very dynamically’. The funny thing is that she is only so effusive when it comes to her material: she genuinely finds her materials so beautiful, so impressive, that her lecture almost sounds like a love song.
‘It's really always about waking people up, stimulating them, inspiring them’
At the end of her speech, a Jedi costume briefly comes into view. Years ago, Jongstra designed the fabrics for it. ‘This was pretty cool’ is really all she says about it. The room breaks into laughter. She is very modest about her own sudden success.
The heart is the theme of this edition of the Night of Arts and Science. Claudy Jongstra has let her heart speak, as she does in her work. Or as she puts it: ‘It's really always about waking people up, stimulating them, inspiring them, and, well, I suppose being a little happy too.’