#helenahernmarck

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With tapestry artist Helena Hernmarck, appeared in Craft in America’s EAST episode. As Hernmarck's long-time studio manager and now archivist, I spoke about her commission for Hudson Yards, which spanned 2016-2020, and about the significance of her work more broadly. Helena's segment premiered on PBS on December 19, 2025. Craft in America also created a short video of Helena and I discussing the paper timeline where she records life events alongside tapestries woven.

> Still from Craft in America's short video about Helena Hernmarck's documentation.

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Blue Wash 1, Helena Hernmarck, 1984, Minneapolis Institute of Art: Decorative Arts, Textiles and Sculpture

predominately blue; blues with maroons/reds and cream; abstract design; received as one piece--separated into a diptych on 3/16/15 Helena Hernmarck is a contemporary artist and weaver best known for her innovative tapestries, many of which have been site-specific commissions for corporate or public buildings. She designed these tapestries as site-specific artworks for the lobby and atrium of Pitney Bowes’s building in Stamford, Connecticut. There, they were two monumental 40-foot-long tapestries – twice the size of her previous large-scale works. For their installation at the MIA, Hernmarck worked with conservators to reconfigure them as four 20-foot-long tapestries. Departing from her usual method of using photography for her tapestry designs, Hernmarck began this project with two of her own watercolor paintings. Her intention was that when hung, the tapestries would evoke the impression of wet paint dripping down the building’s expansive walls. Size: 236 × 132 in. (599.44 × 335.28 cm) (a) 237 × 131 1/2 in. (601.98 × 334.01 cm) (b) Medium: Wool

https://collections.artsmia.org/art/119697/

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Blue Wash 2, Helena Hernmarck, 1984, Minneapolis Institute of Art: Decorative Arts, Textiles and Sculpture

predominately cream; blues with maroons/reds and cream; abstract design; received as one piece--separated into a diptych on 3/16/15 Helena Hernmarck is a contemporary artist and weaver best known for her innovative tapestries, many of which have been site-specific commissions for corporate or public buildings. She designed these tapestries as site-specific artworks for the lobby and atrium of Pitney Bowes’s building in Stamford, Connecticut. There, they were two monumental 40-foot-long tapestries – twice the size of her previous large-scale works. For their installation at the MIA, Hernmarck worked with conservators to reconfigure them as four 20-foot-long tapestries. Departing from her usual method of using photography for her tapestry designs, Hernmarck began this project with two of her own watercolor paintings. Her intention was that when hung, the tapestries would evoke the impression of wet paint dripping down the building’s expansive walls. Size: 236 1/2 × 135 1/2 in. (600.71 × 344.17 cm) (a) 238 × 133 in. (604.52 × 337.82 cm) (b) Medium: Wool

https://collections.artsmia.org/art/119698/

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Excerpt from ‘Inches Woven Per Day: A Tapestry Artist’s Records and the Catalogue Raisonné.’ This presentation posited an approach to catalogue raisonné research that accounts for, even embraces, some of the particularities of the tapestry medium, with tapestry artist Helena Hernmarck’s archive as example. Presented as part of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association panel at the College Art Association Virtual Conference, February 19, 2022.

> Detail from a handwritten spreadsheet created by Hernmarck to document tapestries woven 1993-2001. 

Behind this body of work is a detailed record-keeping system Hernmarck has evolved throughout her career to support her artistic practice. [...] [These records] provide a foundation for the artist’s catalogue raisonné, and also raise a host of questions about the scope of this research and the form the project will take. Where does the catalogue raisonné process begin and end? How can the catalogue raisonné format be adapted to reflect both the artist’s body of tapestries and the record-keeping systems that support them? How do ideas of authorship, objectivity, and authoritativeness transform when primary documents present a substantial record of each work? What is the role of the catalogue raisonné scholar in seeing such a project to fruition? 

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Excerpt from article written for Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot about Helena Hernmarck’s weaving technique as reflected in the structure and contents of her archive. > Mae Colburn, “A Weaver’s Logic: Inside the Archive of Helena Hernmarck,” Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot, Spring 2021.

> Hernmarck unfolds the timeline where she records life events alongside tapestries woven. 

Hernmarck’s technique differs from traditional tapestry weave in that it accumulates row-by-row on a floor loom, tamped down with a beater, rather than woven in mosaic-like sections and tamped down with a handheld fork. This allows progress to be measured chronologically, as inches through time.

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On graph paper, cut into 2 inch by 12 inch strips taped together lengthwise, Hernmarck records life events alongside tapestries woven, all of which take months, if not years, to conceive and complete. This chart, started in 1976 when Hernmarck was 35, now stretches 44 feet long. Taken out of its file drawer and unfolded, it extends the entire length of the wool wall and continues around the corner.

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Excerpt from essay written for the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association series, The Catalogue Raisonné and the Ellipsis. The essay speaks from a personal perspective about my work with Helena Hernmarck’s archive during the pandemic. > Mae Colburn, “Intervals at the Loom,” The Catalogue Raisonné and the Ellipsis, Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association, February 28, 2021. 

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I often make time in December to reflect on the past year, so this invitation to write comes as a welcome extension of my routine. For years, I have kept notebooks filled with lists, thoughts, ideas. Sometimes just one notebook, and sometimes several as I attempt to distinguish one part of my life from another: personal and professional, academic and artistic. The existence of a notebook indicates an intention, and the addition of a new notebook can signal change.

I have tried using blue ink to refer to the future, red ink to refer to the past, and black ink for everything in between. [...]

This year was different from years past. Fewer notebooks, a jumble of colors, and entire months left uncharted, but I did keep three notebooks at play, one to record personal thoughts, one for weaving ideas, and one for my work with tapestry artist Helena Hernmarck, which I’ll discuss here. Four notebooks if I include the sketch pad I used to draw what I saw in the stillness of lockdown: periwinkles, wild violets, bearded irises, a whole variety of trees, each with distinct leaves, in the park near my apartment.

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Excerpt from catalog essay for ‘Helena Hernmarck: Weaving in Progress’ exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (October 14 - January 27, 2019). > Mae Colburn, “In Helena Hernmarck’s Studio.” In Helena Hernmarck: Weaving in Progress, ed. Richard Klein. Ridgefield: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, November 2018. 

> View of Folded Letter O (2019) in progress on Hernmarck’s loom in ‘Helena Hernmarck: Weaving in Progress’ exhibition. Photo: Jason Mandella, courtesy of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

At this point, individual strands begin to mingle. Warm meets cool, active meets passive. A pale purple might join a deep pink. A thin orange might join a thick green. These combinations, looped multiple times around one’s thumb and pinky finger and secured around the middle, are called butterflies. Butterflies, fed into the warp, compose a tapestry.

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Butterflies change row to row, and sometimes even within a row depending on the weaver’s interpretation of the design. Perception is paramount in this technique, and with it the tacit acknowledgment that perception is ever changing. 

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Excerpt from presentation on Helena Hernmarck’s Blue Wash tapestries at ‘A Beautiful Role: Architecture and the Display of Art,’ graduate student symposium at the Yale Center for British Art, October 8, 2016. Blue Wash (1984) was commissioned as a set of two forty-foot long tapestries for the Pitney Bowes headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. When the headquarters were sold in 2014, Hernmarck divided the set into four twenty-foot long tapestries, to conform to the proportions of their new home in the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Fountain Court.

> Helena Hernmarck examines Blue Wash I upon its completion in 1984. Photo: Hans Hammarskiöld

This presentation owes a great deal to T’ai Smith’s essay ‘Tapestries in Space: An Alternative History of Site-Specificity’ (Fiber : Sculpture 1960 - Present, New York: Prestel, 2014), which attempts to forge a legitimate position for site-specific textile artworks outside the dominant narratives of minimalism and postminimalism, where commercial commissions are often framed as uncritical or mainstream. 

Smith’s essay repositions these artworks within the long history of tapestry, where their relationship to architecture, as well as the skills involved in their production, may be more more sensitively, and more thoughtfully considered. 

> Separation and conservation of Blue Wash I at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, March 2015. Photo: Jennifer Komar-Olivarez

Part of my ambition here is to apply this perspective to museum practice, and to propose that rather than entering museums as autonomous artworks (in line with modernist paradigms of museum display), site-specific textile artworks might instead be re-sited within the museum. That is, reconfigured to conform to the museum-as-site, as we see in the example of Helena Hernmarck’s Blue Wash.