This year's festival artist at Bergen Strikkefestival 2026 (Bergen Knitting Festival) is Silje Heggren. The exhibition runs from 26 September to 13 December and can be seen during the museum's opening hours.
«Miasmer» is an extensive art project that marks a new, three-dimensional and textile-based direction in Heggren's artistic practice.
The project consists of wall-mounted reliefs, textile sculptures and freestanding forms, where each work consists of hand-crocheted forms in natural materials such as wool, linen and cotton. Each work is an accumulation of thousands of hours of work, built up from individual units formed without a fixed or deliberate plan, so that the forms emerge as unpredictable organisms.
The works carry within them both the systematic and the chaotic; they alternate between appearing as corals, mushrooms and entrails, or complex, unknown structures. The works are both beautiful and unsettling; attractive and repellent at the same time.
Some of my «Miasmas» are mounted under glass domes; the kind often used to display artefacts, plants, organs or other things. Several of the works have motors that make them rotate, others are filled with unwashed raw wool that gives off a distinct smell of wool, sheep and nature. Going forward I will include rotating mirror balls in the project, where the tactile, soft forms «consume» the hard mirror surfaces of the disco balls. I also want to test using sound installations together with the textile installations, to explore the miasmas' «atmospheric» qualities.
