Ann Rasmussen

Ann Rasmussen embroiders time and sound. Making an embroidery takes time: as the needle is moved slowly and precisely through the linen, the thread forms stitches that bear witness to these movements. Rasmussen’s embroidery also contains the sound of another era, and in Kamelputens vuggevise (‘the camel pillow’s lullaby’), the artist was inspired by the aural universe hidden away in her paternal grandfather’s 75-year-old sofa pillow. She recorded the sounds of the pillow and then transferred some of the recording’s graphic profile into the embroidery. The image on the pillow, a desert warrior on a camel, has given the embroidery its title. 

Rasmussen herself says that she works on “soundless sound in a wireless era”. How much sound does silence contain? The silence as you sit and embroider can be deafening, intrusive, or meditative. How are our other senses roused, the artist asks, “so that we, in our high-speed, wi-fi era, can hear them with our eyes, see them with our ears, and feel them with our fingers”? SH