TEXTILE ARTIST MEIKE LEGLER
The textile artist with a fashion design degree moved back to Germany last year after living 5 years in Los Angeles.
We live in my hometown Alzenau that I left 19 years ago to live and experience the big wide world, but with Corona, I felt that with a little kid the idea to live near my folks in an idyllic small town seemed quite attractive. My studio is in the next village, just a 10 minute bike ride away, in a former clothing production factory, which is quite funny as I used to work in fashion before I turned towards fine art.
Your inspirations or influences Meike?
Our universe, books about life after death, reincarnation, decay, humor, music and textures.
Tell us a bit about your creative process and things you are looking forward to this year..
Often I start with the title of the piece that comes to my mind by listening to the news, into myself, or to the people I am surrounded by. The title determines the shapes, colors, and the composition. Sometimes I also just see a composition in front of my inner eye, I draw doodles on paper and then I choose fabrics with different textures to add depth and character.
I love using fabrics that have laid outdoors for a long time as the sun and the rain work into the fibers and give it a unique and weathered look.
In another experiment I buried a found bed sheet in the soil of my friends' property in Los Angeles for 8 months. The earth, moisture and microorganisms left almost out of space like patterns on the sheet that I now use pieces of to integrate into my works.
Bleach is another medium that I have started using as it changes the colors of the fabrics in ways that are not controllable and that creates its own irreversible pattern.
I use the coexistence between the destroyed, dirty, rebellious fabrics and the impeccable, new and clean fabrics to depict an analogy to our human existence in a body that is often coined by experiences like being hurt and hurting, trauma, suffering, failure and grief and on the other side our eternal, divine and pure souls.
In the past 4 years I have created a large body of works in which I have constantly explored the medium fabric. I made collages, hand stitched and glued fabric on top of each other, integrated other media such as paper, acrylic paint, dirt, clay, crayon and used a wide variety of fabrics ranging from vintage military tents, latex, fake fur, vintage linen, drop cloth, velvet, upholstery fabric, curtains, bed sheets and wool. I’ve played with pleats, volume, draping, geometric shapes, organic and fluid shapes and am continuing to explore.
How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the world changing moving forward?
It has at times diminished my motivation to create but then again it has also pushed me to experiment more and try new things.
Yes, it absolutely needs to be improved but besides buying mainly second hand, fairly and sustainable produced clothing and in general buying less I am not the one to offer the big solutions.
Meike what does wellbeing mean to you?
For me, wellbeing is a state of balance that includes feeling physically strong, good about the work I do, excited to produce new works and being a part of a community that shares my values and views on life and the world. It’s a feeling of lightness, of things just clicking and being in a flow of creating, getting enough time to reflect and relax.