Signe Emdal

Signe Emdal (b. 1979, Denmark)

Guest Artist at Rademakers Gallery

Signe Emdal is a visual artist and master artisan whose practice centers on weaving as a vessel for embodied memory, sensory intuition, and architectural thinking. Working across sculpture, tapestry, and spatial textile interventions, Emdal approaches her medium as a dialogue between structure, emotion, and environment. Her work draws deeply from indigenous textile traditions, daylight and landscape studies, feminist perspectives, ancient carpet and rug technologies, and innovative models of social connectedness.

Practice and Method – “Energy Dialogue”

A defining element of Emdal’s practice is her concept of energy dialogue — a form of sensory communication that unfolds directly within the loom window, without preliminary sketches or a predetermined grid. Instead, her works are developed through mathematical systems, embodied awareness, and an immersive response to the location where the piece is created. This method engages with what she calls the Inner Ear: an attunement to how the body navigates space, how material behaves, and how the present moment guides form. Working in natural-light spaces around the world, Emdal allows architecture, landscape, and local cultural histories to influence each piece. Her sustainable, site-specific approach keeps the process intimate, improvisational, and deeply connected to place.

Medium Series and Material Innovation

Emdal sees the loom as "a window for storing memories." Her sculptures and tapestries emerge from fragments of ancient structural principles, recombined through a futuristic, fluid process into what she terms Medium series. This long-term body of research builds on two decades of technical experience in tracking, archiving, and shaping structural expressions using wool fibers as a primary material. Her conceptual framework is inspired in part by the Interstellar Medium (ISM) and models of community-building—guiding her to develop foundational physical mediums for her artworks. As her practice evolves, Emdal expands her toolkit to include analogue photography and stained-glass principles, integrating light, transparency, and layered time into her textile language.

Education

• MA Textile design Designskolen Kolding-DK, Jacquard knitting techniques, colours & flexible structures inspired by ancient Egyptian objects
• Master technician at Ole Strange knitting factory in Ry -DK
• Weaver at The National Museum of Denmark, Brede Værk, Mølleåen- DK

Exhibitions

• National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland
• National Gallery of Denmark (SMK), Copenhagen, Denmark
• Danish Design Makers, Sweden
•  Lake Como Design Fair, Como, Italy