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Colorful Hand-Woven Walls Create a Clever Optical Illusion

When looking at this piece by artist Wies Preijde, you might not realize that it's actually a site-specific installation. The flattened space and combination of lines and colors make it look like a drawing. It's only when we see a person standing in the room that we're assured that Predijde's work is a clever optical illusion. She's titled it Tegendraads.

The intriguing installation features various hand-woven walls that skew with our perspective of the space. It blends real and faux areas with a dizzying array of patterns as well as vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. Since Tegendraads uses overlapping fibers, the walls are slightly transparent and provide us a lens to the other sides of the dividers. This subtle effect is intended to pique our curiosity and entice us to explore. Then, we can decide on what's actually product of Preijde's imagination.

Wies Preijde website
via [makegood]

Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes is a Staff Editor at My Modern Met, Manager of My Modern Met Store, and co-host of the My Modern Met Top Artist Podcast. As an illustrator and writer living in Seattle, she chronicles illustration, embroidery, and beyond through her blog Brown Paper Bag and Instagram @brwnpaperbag. She wrote a book about embroidery artist Sarah K. Benning titled "Embroidered Life" that was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Sara is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA in Illustration in 2008 and MFA in Illustration Practice in 2013.
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