Isabelle Hällsjö
August 2 – September 28 2025
The thread knitting artist from Orust whose work tells the story of the sea and the women, craftsmanship and time.
Isabelle Hällsjö is the artist who lives and works on the farthest edge of western Orust, an island in the Skagerrak strait in the North Sea. She has multiple times been awarded with fine scholarships. After her artistic degree, she has worked exploratively on building three-dimensional objects. Thread and knitting are her main tools and means of expression. Hällsjö describes it as her own way of sculpting her language. A structure of irregular regularity emerges, where formats vary from the bodily to the spatial, often in mutual interaction. The materials she uses vary, from coarse iron wire to the finest silk – often recycled. Hällsjö is challenged by the contrasts of the materials and our ideas about how they should be used. Linen is the textile fiber that she constantly returns to, and with different methods she tries to take advantage of linen’s inherent character, its robust elegance and fragile strength.
Hällsjö explains that everything starts with the thread. An unbroken thread builds and supports the entire form. She unreservedly lets her thoughts reach her hand, where the whole grows from the details. Her artistic objects speak their own abstract language, colored by the stories she carries – about the sea and the women, craftsmanship and time.
Experience Hällsjö’s exhibition where wire objects in metal occupy the space in the form of a turbulent sea, floating clouds, an iron-supported skirt and a cardigan for a guardian angel. Works in copper and linen seem to have been taken from the depths of the sea. All hand-knitted.
Instagram: @isabellehallsjo
