Urban Color Palette, Charlotte

A native of Iceland, Hildur Bjarnadóttir learned knitting, crochet, tatting, and embroidery from her mother, an elementary school teacher who taught these traditional techniques to her students.

During summers, Hildur and her sisters (she is a triplet) helped their mother develop school projects. Growing up within a matrilineal culture with a strong textile tradition, Hildur also learned from her grandmothers.

These childhood experiences of making stayed with her as she received formal training from the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts (BFA, textiles, 1992) and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (MFA, new forms, 1997).

The artists Project Ten Ten Ten commission, "Urban Color Palette, Charlotte", offers a visual representation of the value of that which is usually overlooked and neglected.

Bjarnadóttir visited Charlotte in March 2010 and gathered local plans from roadsides and vacant lots near the Urban Ministry, an interfaith organization in Uptown Charlotte that aims to end homelessness.

Then, she boiled the plants to create dyes that she used to color wool yarn from Icelandic sheep, using the lobby of the former location of The Mint Museum of Craft + Design as her studio, allowing visitors to participate in the process.

Although usually considered weeds, the plants she gathered—clover, dandelion flowers, and chickweed, among others—yielded a remarkable array of colors, such as off-white, yellow, brown, and red, as seen in the squares and rectangles that she crocheted with help from her neighbors in Reykjavik.