The indifferent waters shift a few centimetres forwards and backwards. Seaweed sways unmindful in the current. The plants know cold and warmth, dry and wet, life at high tide and near disappearance at low. In their own habitat, they tend to live close together, at times adapting and adjusting to each other. Occasional loners will cling to rocks, to seashells, to the hull of a vessel that has not set sail for years.

Light green seaweeds are luminous. Red ones may already be rotting, turning pink and orange and aubergine. Come closer and they look transparent and fleeting, like dreams. But the dark ones are strong and sturdy, like the night.

In their final hours, they resist drying out on the beach. Just a few surrender to collecting hands. The seaweeds Estelle Gassmann used for her collection of bed linens comes from Roscoff in Brittany.

Gassmann studied textile design in Lucerne. She has been working as a designer and conducting her research as an artist since 2006. Her works are surreal-poetic encounters that take shape in textiles and ceramics, the preferred vehicles for her art. She is interested in motif and material, and also in the people committed to a work process that usually takes several years from initial spark to finished product.

Text: Sibylle Ciarloni

Material: Reactive inkjet print on 100% cotton fine sateen, 115gr/mtq.

Sizes: Standard sizes Switzerland in stock. Extra sizes per order.

Speciality: Pattern repeat size 234x221cm: Each duvet cover and pillowcase shows another pictorial detail of the allover print.

Production: Designed in Zurich, woven and printed in Italy, sewn in Austria.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Giuseppe Micciché

Project description

Estelle Gassmann’s interest in seaweed, in all of its forms and features, goes back to March 2017. While visiting the Museu Marítimo de Ílhavo in Portugal, she discovered the work of Américo Teles (1893-1983), the founder of the museum and a passionate algologist. There she bought the book Guia Prático de Preparação de Algas Marinhas, a practical guide to preparing seaweed, published by his granddaughter Sónia Teles. A year later in March 2018, she attended a course on preparing seaweed, offered by Teles, an architect who lives in Porto and manages her grandfather’s estate.

In July 2018, Gassmann joined an excursion of biology students from the University and the ETH in Zurich to Roscoff in Brittany. She worked at the Station Biologique de Roscoff, selecting and collecting seaweed at low tide. She prepared and pressed some of her finds; others she left to dry in the sun. She took all of them home again on her return to Switzerland.

That winter she placed the specimens from Roscoff in an illuminated bowl of water, one after the other, where they rehydrated and regained all of their colours. She examined their shapes and features – and she discovered traces. Gently, she spread them out on dampened paper using a straw of piassava fibre, occasionally cutting off one or two overlapping twigs. For hours, days, evenings. The specimens stuck to the paper. Having covered them with a layer of gauze, placed between newspapers and books, she spent the next few months making scans and isolating the specimens with Photoshop. Pictured against a white background, they were now ready to be used for her new collection of bed linens: algas marinhas. Gassmann enlarged them. Sometimes she found tiny snails sticking to them – and visible traces of salt. Some of the seaweed was already decaying when she collected them so that their colours ranged from old rose to pink. The fork weed shines light green. The palmaria palmata or red dulse lies aubergine-coloured on the table. Four compositions result:

algas marinhas Tramonto
algas marinhas Corpo
algas marinhas Respiro
algas marinhas Alba

The linens were produced in the winter and spring of 2020. Gassmann selected cotton satin from a mill in northern Italy, on which she printed the designs using a reactive digital printing process, as she had done in the creations Fieldand Embedded Stories. She had linens manufactured in Dornbirn, Austria.

Estelle Gassmann studied textile design in Lucerne. She has been working as a designer and conducting her artistic research since 2006. Her works are surreal-poetic encounters. Textiles and ceramics are the preferred vehicles for her art. She is interested in motif and material, and also in the people committed to a work process that usually takes several years from initial spark to finished product. The products are available directly from her studio, her online shop, various retailers and at design fairs in Switzerland. See and read more at: www.estellegassmann.ch

Text:  Sibylle Ciarloni

Thanks to:
Museu Marítimo de Ílhavo, Sónia Teles e Silva, Manuel António Marques da Cruz Costa, Lukas Taxböck, Christof Eichenberger, Oliver Yves Martin, students excursion organisms of the tidal coast University / ETH Zurich 2018, Silvia Bär, Selina Bütler, Dario Meier, Ralph Sonderegger, Grit Röser, Jennifer Grunder, Sara Zeiter, Annette Roserens, Katie Horwich, Nicole Leuthold, Lubomira Lavrikova, Anna-Katharina Wittmann, Doris Gassmann, Sibylle Ciarloni, Catherine Schelbert, Giuseppe Micciché, Jelica Sever, Annatina Nay.