Amandah L’Narte

I grew up on the west coast of Sweden, in a home where jazz, rock and pop lived alongside ceramics, textiles and painting. My grandparents were diplomats, and their home was filled with objects from their travels, especially rugs from the Middle East, dense with patterns, symbols and colour. When I was five, my sister and I spent two months living with them in Tehran.

The vibrant, colourful home on the west coast, the journey to Tehran and my fascination with the musical The Sound of Music, in which curtains are transformed into clothes, planted a seed in me: the realisation that materials can be tactile and visual stories, full of life.

My path led from fashion design at Beckman College of Design to an MFA in textile art at Konstfack. Fashion taught me about the body’s sensory superpowers: how texture and materials feel against the skin, how a space feels when you stand within it and how materials change through movement.

Today I move between painting, textile art, illustration and surface pattern design. My textile practice includes machine knitting, hand knitting, crochet, tufting, printing and sculptural embroidery. This physical and material sensitivity carries through everything I make. The works are made to be encountered up close, not only viewed from a distance.

During my MFA at Konstfack, I created Elastica Symbiotica: In Search for The Garden of Fiber Delights, a garden of fibre delights and a place to rest and find nourishment, inhabited by contemporary spirits and unexpected adventures. The project was first shown at the 2022 Konstfack Degree Exhibition. From October 2023 to January 2024, it grew into a public installation at Odenplan metro station as part of Region Stockholm’s Konstväxlingar programme.

The world I create is inhabited by sphircles. They are hybrid beings of human, animal and plant origin that move through the gardens as guides. They appear in paintings, textile works and surface patterns. Sometimes they appear where you least expect them.

I often think of my works as visual songs.

Colour is the voice, form is the melody, and each work is a composition that speaks where language ends.

That is why this world cannot be hurried through. The songs are best heard by those who stay. A work should be a place to land.

My background in fashion has also made questions of production and consumption part of my practice. In Melt Away, I worked with reclaimed materials. For Now is the time of monsters, we used pre-orders and co-creation to explore alternatives for financial sustainability and avoid producing more garments than there was demand for.

Sometimes my creative world is shown in a gallery, and sometimes it is printed on a garment. At other times, it becomes an immersive room you can enter or fits inside a pocket as a postcard. I do not separate art from commercial work. It is the same world with many doors, and they all lead into a greater story about a world of resonance.