Weathering Blue

The project  Weathering Blue (Weer Blauw) is a visual record of colour and seasonal change made tangible. The blue shirts on the clothesline changed over the course of months of hard blue to lighter blue.

The project  Weathering Blue (Weer Blauw) is a visual record of colour and seasonal change made tangible. The blue shirts on the clothesline changed over the course of months of hard blue to lighter blue. Commissioned by the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen a collection of textiles is developed in situ as part of the exhibition NIJVER|heden.

Aliki painted a pattern of a shirt from 1910 with bluing on cotton. During the exhibition, the processed fabrics hung on a clothesline in the outdoor museum and acted as weather vanes. Each cloth had a label stating the number of days that it had been hanging out on the line, the average temperature, wind force, wind direction and the number of millimeters of rain that the fabric had absorbed.

Rain, wind and sun washed and dried the fabrics and over the months changed their color from hard blue to a lighter shade of blue. One by one, they were then taken off the clothesline and made into shirts after a contemporary 2014 pattern.