Signe Linnarsson

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Hem-lig [Swedish: hemlig = secret/hidden; hem-lig = homey]
Hem-lig examines how women are repeatedly placed within the domestic sphere, where objects, routines, and expectations quietly shape her identity. The scenographic installation makes visible these overlooked patriarchal structures through five objects – the apron, the stool, the textiles, the bread bowl, and the kitchen sofa – paired with a soundscape, a script, and an object dictionary. Rooted in a Swedish context, familiar forms carry traces of past and present, positioning the woman as both subject and tool within these conditions. These objects are physical evidence of what is endured yet persistently unrecognized, their mundaneness masking the weight they carry. Yet by attenting these overlooked traces, we open up the possibility of reimagining the present narrative.

Scenographic Installation, Craft, Pine, Latex, Sound, Performance, Writing.

Embodied Exploration Through Composition
An embodied research investigation into relational dynamics with inherited material entities. Positioning the woman’s body in composition with three traditional Swedish objects, the work explores how relations are sustained, conformed, created, and inherited within specific historical and social contexts. Using composition as a tool to reimagine, restory, and investigate how these relations shift, deepen, or strengthen – and how they are felt and lived in the body.

How might repositioning through composition offer a way to renegotiate or reauthor the woman’s relation to inherited cultural complexity?

Embodied Research, Compositional Performance, Material Investigation.

Waiting
Waiting is an expressive writing piece examining how the repeated act of waiting reveals character through individual disruption and gesture. By ’truly listening’ to how each person waits differently, small behavioral variations become legible as expressions of the individual. Composed through fragmented language, misspellings, and sentence fragments.

Realized as a site-specific immersive performance where texts are read with audience seating arranged to mirror the original spatial location, positioning visitors as unwitting participants in the composed environment.

Observational Writing Practice, Site-Specific Immersive Performance.

Unnoticed in Plain Sight: Inherited Craft as Language and Gender Bias
Unnoticed in Plain Sight is an exploratory investigation into gender bias within Swedish craft and the associations that have shaped craft historically and continue to shape it today. Through archival research and analysis of textile patterns made by women in Götaland, Sweden, the project traces textile as a language of embodied knowledge and expression.

The patterns are deconstructed and translated through material experiments in wood and metal, exploring what happens when a historically feminine craft language enters materials traditionally associated with masculine forms of making. The material tests become a way of investigating what can be carried, transformed, and re-expressed through translation, intentionally blurring the boundaries between gender and craft.

Wood, Metal, Craft, Archival Research, Pattern Analysis, Material Translation

Götaland has a long tradition of crafts made by the simple people, at home or in the industries. The textile industry was the first foot in for women to gain their independence. But thought out history women in crafts met obstacles, worked around them and being silently resilient. Restrains, changes, projection on how society should view the craft of textile. From being the first step to independence, pride and a glimpse of freedom to later be seen as something shameful and scandalous when women all of a sudden gained their independence in the early 1900s, to later be seen as “women’s-work” or being criticised as simply a “hobby”, to today where both boys and girls all grow up to with wood and textile classes since primary school. But still at this time and age there is this tension and scepticism; “Wood is for boys and textile for girls.” Likewise is the reality of metal and textile.

Far more than a domestic craft, weaving became a language through which women could express what might otherwise remain unheard. The patterns were not merely decorative; they carried traces of everyday life, inherited knowledge, personal stories, struggles, and triumphs. Through pattern, colour, and thread, women inscribed their experiences into the fabric of their surroundings, creating a visual language passed between generations. Restricted in where and how they could speak, they nevertheless continued to do so. Their voices were woven into textiles, present in plain sight within the home, yet often overlooked, undervalued, or left unread. These textiles form a quiet but persistent record of women’s lives, creativity, embodied knowledge and intellectual contributions.

[1] Archival research. Woven textile patterns made by unknown (woman) from Götaland, Sweden.

Throughout this project, I collected imagery of woven textile patterns from Götaland, the southernmost of Sweden's three regions. Slöjföreningar, museums, and archival institutions across Sweden generously provided access to these images. As part of my research, I visited the Textile Museum in Tilburg to examine historic looms – crafted in Sweden and still housed in the building – with their original punchcards intact. During this visit, I discovered Lilli Zickerman's Sveriges folkliga textilkonst. Del 1: Rölakan (1937), a foundational study of Swedish folk textile traditions.

In this work, Zickerman documents röllakan, a traditional Swedish flat-weave technique used to create durable woolen rugs and tapestries distinguished by their geometric patterns and rich symbolism. During its flourishing in the 18th and 19th centuries, women transformed wool into a visual language, weaving motifs shaped by their surroundings, traditions, and lived experiences.

Patterns of Röllakan

The Hidden Patterns of Röllakan

Through analysing the archived textiles and reading about Röllakan in Zickerman’s book, I began to notice small symbols recurring across many of the patterns. Often, they took time to recognise, yet they were among the most frequently repeated elements.

I became interested in bringing attention to these almost invisible symbols. They are not necessarily figurative or immediately recognisable, but form a quiet and consistent visual language within the textiles. Much like the voice and craft language of the women who made them: present and clear, yet continuously overlooked.

However, while exploring the other archives, I discovered textiles that diverted from these traditional röllakan patterns. One pattern of outcuts particularly inspired me – a free-form cutting into woven fabric that abandoned the rigid grid structure of conventional weaving. This became an example of self-exploration within the language of textile itself. Alongside the hidden but continuously repeated patterns of traditional röllakan, this free-form approach became my own patterns of exploration, continuing the conversation between order and individual expression that these women initiated centuries before.

Unknown Freeform Pattern

[2] Pattern Analysis, Deconstruction.

Square patterns and circular holes in punchcards.

[3] Translation to wood and metal.

[4] Repetition, Direction.

[5] Perspectives, 3D, Form, Structure, Ornament, Integration.

Garments Square
An intuitive and exploratory study of garmentmaking, inspired by simple everyday clothing across different periods, from early Viking dress and European peasant clothing to lower-working-class garments before and after industrialisation.

The video explores the possibilities of making garments from simple shapes and limited materials. Squares are cut, openings made for the body, and textiles folded, wrapped, pinned and tied. Through layering and movement, the shapes transform from flat surfaces into volume, shifting between the structural and the fluid, the fragile and the sculptural. The experiments explore the relationship between material and body: how they resist one another and become one through composition. In this process, different forms, associations and characters emerge.

Composed of stills from the process, the video records these transformations as a visual narrative. Rather than simply documenting the making, the sequence allows the process itself to become the storytelling.

Garmentmaking, Intuitive Research, Material Experimentation, Visual Narrative

textile, scissor, pins and string

(choose speed )

sketches cuts, folds and squares i made

Material Memory of Distruction
How can the materiality of a home abandoned by time relate to that of a home destroyed by violence?

This project explores material memory through fragments from two homes: one abandoned by time in Eindhoven, the other destroyed in by the war in Ukraine. Whether decayed by time, altered through reconstruction, or left in ruins, something remains. Although their stories radically differ, their materials can still speak to one another. Dimensions match, curves align, and shapes overlap. Through these encounters, the fragments begin to tell a common story of home.

Reassembled as a fragment of a roof, the materials find a new purpose through their similarities. Each piece retains its own memory while becoming part of something collective. The reconstruction asks how the histories embedded in constuction materials can be carried forward – how rebuilding can treat matter not simply as material, but as an archive.

In bringing these fragments together, the project explores how different histories can coexist within the same structure, and how material can carry memory from one home into another.

Found Materials, Material Investigation, Reassembly, Construction.

*Collective work in collaboration with Lina Architecture Organization, Lina Fellows Kateryna Lopatiuk and Tiphaine Bedel.

Kyivo-Myrotska Street 91, Bucha, Ukraine

Bokt 18, Eindhoven, Netherlands

On the outskirts of Eindhoven, the old farmhouse at Bokt 18 still stands. It
hasn't been used for years, and the owners have recently put locks in
place to stop trespassers from entering. How can the materiality of a home
abandoned by time relate to that of a home destroyed by violence?

Whether it has been decayed by time, demolished by reconstruction or
destroyed by violence, there is always something physical left behind.
Although the stories they tell radically differ, their materiality still speaks to
one another. Dimensions match, curves line up, shapes overlap.
They tell a common story of a home.

The materials find similarities to reconstruct a fragment of a roof. While each
piece of rubble still holds its own individual memory, it also gains a new purpose and value through cooperative reassembly.

Is pallen (en. the stool) a friend or a foe?
This zine explores, through a feminist lens, whether mundane material objects can embody patriarchal structures – functioning as instruments of hierarchy or domination in relation to women, with a focus on wooden furniture, folk craft, and slöjd traditions in Götaland, Sweden.

It also works as a constructional blueprint for the reader to re-build, re-think, and re-imagine its placement, role and narrative it carries withing todays inhabited spaces.

Material Culture, Folk Craft, Slöjd, Gender and Power

In my head
Fleeting moments are captured through the lens of what I see and hear. The works begins with noticing: opening my eyes and ears to what is already there. Video and sound become ways of recording and translating these observations – a feeling, a detail, an object, a movement, a memory, or something abstract that I cannot put into words.

Following the senses, I allow my eyes and ears to lead. Through video, I try to give form to things that might otherwise remain intangible, making them visible and almost tangible.

Landscapes, objects, movement, scale and perception drift together for a few minutes on the screen, much like they do in my head.

Moving Image, Sound, Observation, Visual Poetry, Embodied Perception