Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov creates “The Onion Farm” in Room 94 of the V&A's Tapestry Galleries for London Design Festival 2018.“The Tapestries Gallery is a long, narrow room kept dark to preserve the historical pieces.In this atmospheric space are housed rare tapestries from 1425 onwards — impressive examples of weaving with rich colors, bold motifs, and textured dimensions. The length of the room gave rise to the idea of a similarly long installation; around 25 metres from end to end,” writes the museum.
Vibskov got inspiration of growing something in the dark, as if underground from the dimmed lighting of the Tapestries Gallery. “The Onion Farm” is a light, dynamic structure that spins along the gallery. “Industrial, colorful brushes and red textile ‘onions’ are seemingly hanging and growing from the structure. The installation will, in line with the tapestries, create a strong tactile impression, but, in its materiality, contrast with the space. This sense of an ancient weaving technique will be reflected in the new work, composed of colorful spindles spun together with a knitted textile,” adds the museum.
Vibskov’s installations boasts of everyday objects that are transformed, put together in a new way to give viewers a point of recognition. For this installation, fabric onions hanging in the dark form a structure, which combined with the industrial brushes, simulate the natural conditions in which they grow, while the brushes, with their large circles of spiny prickly hairs, create a vibrating membrane along the structure. The interactive installation cannot be touched by the public, but visitors are invited to touch and move through it as they walk along the gallery. In some places the passage narrows and forces the visitor to be brushed as they move through. Inspired by the depiction of grand nature scenes in the tapestries and their variety of wildlife tableaux, this installation, in the same way, refers to natural elements, shapes and colors but perhaps also comments on the hyper-industrialized state of agriculture today.
