KARI DYRDAL

Kari Dyrdal is a textile artist known for monumental tapestries that exhibit a dual mastery of the cultural tradition of handweaving alongside an intricately researched digital production. Dyrdal’s practice involves a deep investigation of memory, incorporating pattern, repetition, and structure as expressions of her ideas on aesthetics and cultural heritage. Working from her personal photography, Dyrdal considers the use of recognizable images as essential to her technique; expanding the potential of textile to communicate, she transforms her photography on the digital loom to create a juxtaposition between pictorial representation and abstraction. Dyrdal's textile works approach grand, architectural scale, and through her meticulous and premeditated digital process and aesthetic—the tightly packed pixels and fine-tuned mechanized control of weaving—an intimacy emerges, a humanity that withstands and is heightened by the technological process.

Drydal serves as a professor in the Faculty of Art, Music, and Design at the University of Bergen. She holds a degree in textile art from Bergen’s Kunsthåndverksskole in 1977 and completed her postgraduate studies at the Croydon College of Art and Technology in London, UK, in 1978. Her work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Oslo, the KODE/Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum in Bergen, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, among others.