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Bettina Willnauer
Bettina Willnauer’s hand-tufted wall works create a colorful, poetic world that invites us to reconsider familiar orders and relationships. In her visual worlds, humans, animals, and plants encounter one another and merge into a shared, interconnected cosmos – ranging from scenes of cosmopolitan life to imaginative depictions of animals and plants. In doing so, the artist frees the tapestry from its traditional role between craft and decoration and understands it as an independent pictorial form.
Willnauer describes her artistic approach as “painting with wool.” Like a painter using a brush, she applies the yarn from the reverse side with a tufting gun, causing the motif to appear mirrored on the front. The yarns form not only areas of color, but also lines, shapes, and structures; individual areas of color often flow seamlessly into one another. Different yarn lengths create a relief-like, tactile surface, while the depicted scenes themselves often remain surprisingly flat. Willnauer explicitly understands her works as artworks rather than design objects. This self-conception is reflected in their formats: instead of following traditional carpet dimensions, she chooses the shape, size, and orientation of her works according to the conventions of painting.
For Willnauer, working with textiles is strongly associated with notions of femininity, yet the technique of tufting disrupts this association. Tufting is physically demanding, heavy, and loud, and the tufting machine is often referred to as a “tufting gun,” further associating the tool with ideas of strength and physical assertiveness that have traditionally been coded as masculine. Wherever threads are cut or pulled out, the rhythmic structure of the tufted fabric is disrupted – an element of unrest that heightens the works’ presence and draws attention to their materiality.
Willnauer’s choice of colors and working process follow an intuitive logic. She finds her subjects in her immediate surroundings, while daydreaming plays an important role. In the series Harvest, she approaches harvesting as a physical act and, at the same time, as a metaphor for an entire cycle of care – from watering a plant to the moment when it finally bears fruit. At its core is the experience that effort gradually pays off and that persistent work is eventually rewarded. Yet the time that comes before is equally important – nurturing, waiting, allowing things to grow. Willnauer consciously associates this continuous process of doing and carrying on with strength as a woman. The acts of doing and allowing to become are also central to her visual worlds: the finished work is both the result of and a trace of an exploratory process of making.
The perception of the motifs is equally characterized by this openness: figures and forms sometimes reveal themselves only from close up or from a greater distance, inviting viewers to change their perspective and physically engage with the work. It is precisely this process-oriented approach that connects the technique with the central theme of the works: the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and plants is not merely an aesthetic motif for Willnauer, but becomes a principle through the textile technique itself – different elements are literally linked together and woven into a new unity. Tapestry thus becomes a metaphor for a fabric of relationships in which different forms of life are interconnected.
(Text: Dora Filo)
