Collecting – Halländska Hemslöjden

In 1886 Hallands Museiförening, the Museums Association of Halland, was formed, with the purpose of collecting exciting objects from the past and showing them to the public. That is the foundation of Halland Art Museum´s collection, that keeps on growing year by year. Thanks to donations, like the Svea Larson fund, we have possibilities to enrich and complete the collection to better reflect Halland, both in terms of history and presence.

Since 2010 we are called Halland Art Museum, and primarily collect visual art. But in our warehouses there are lots of other things, for example large textile collections. A crucial part of those is the home craft archives of Halländska Hemslöjden, which was passed over to Halland Art Museum in 2014. Most of which is on display in the small boxes on the short wall derives from there and is just a small part of that collection.

In the first box to the left we see the equivalent of mood boards made by an unknown interior designer. They contain work sheets for weaving and samples for curtains, rugs and furniture fabrics as well as wall paper. In the next box small woven sketches or samples for a larger wall hanging made for Halmstad Ironworks are shown. They were woven in 1953 by Birgitta Hagnell Lindén, who was born in Halmstad. She was then still a student at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. The colours are quite bright; blue, red, orange and purple contrasting the black in abstract compositions that can remind of painting.

We continue with Märta Rinde-Ramsbäck, who in her thirties moved to the north of Halland and stayed there. She was one of the founders of the artist group Fjäregruppen and taught at the School of Arts and Crafts, today´s Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg. In the box water colour sketches are shown, as well as samples of wool yarn for rugs made in the 1950´s. The colour scheme is more subtle and the patterns stricter than Hagnell Lindén´s.

Textile art has traditionally been dominated very much by women, but in the box below is a water colour sketch and the belonging weaving kit by Olle Danielsson. The hues are blue and one can distinguish the lines of a tree. In their shop at Storgatan in Halmstad Halländska Hemslöjden sold loads of such small Do-it-yourself-kits with patterns designed by various weavers up until 2011. The customers bought the work sheet and the yarn, and borrowed the sketch with the yarn samples, like in a library. Some of the motifs were for sale all over Sweden, but many were unique for Halland.

At the right end of the wall there are two boxes, a smaller one on top and a somewhat larger below. The smaller box contains a sample of a Flemish weave, by Harriet Jensen. In the box below are twelve woven bands in different techniques. In the bottom of the box lays a weaving kit for the belt to the traditional costume of Breared.