YOUNG TALENTS
Emma Terweduwe

Emma Terweduwe (14/02/1996) is a Belgian textile designer and artist based in Ghent, specialising in jacquard weaving. Emma’s work is tactile and expressive, combining natural and durable materials, strong and colorful graphic design, and her unique process of felting woven fabrics. By making textiles that are meant to stimulate our sense of touch, she offers a critique on our fast-paced and visually driven society. After graduating in Textile Design from Ghent’s KASK Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Terweduwe has collaborated with various brands and institutions, from Henrik Vibskov and Bless to the Tilburg Textile Museum, before establishing her own studio by the end of 2020. Her pieces are luxurious and expressive, combining natural and durable materials, strong and colourful graphic design, and her unique process of felting woven fabrics. Through felting and manipulating, the woven fabrics start to wrinkle, shrink, move and distort.
A play unravels between visual depth and actual layers within the weaves, revealing their most tactile characteristics. By making textile pieces that are meant to stimulate our sense of touch, Terweduwe’s tactile works offer a critique on our fast-paced and superficial society, which increasingly values appearance over substance. For Emma, collaboration with other master artisans is a central component of her philosophy – both as a means to create a textile piece of the highest quality, and as a way to preserve important local crafts and traditions. Her approach is deliberately slow and considered, applying digital tools to analogue processes without compromising on the characteristics of a handmade object. Using natural materials with subtle yet expressive properties, her woven works assume an organic and tactile feeling, brought into the present by bold graphic patterns.