Mythology Woven Artwork Collection by Kustaa Saksi.

Finnish multidisciplinary visual artist Kustaa Saksi has created a series of woven artworks based on well-known mythologies, folk tales and legends from around the world. From the Ancient Greek narratives and African tales to legends of indigenous peoples from Taiwan, the Amsterdam based designer has interpreted these ancient ideas through weaving, using texture and pattern.

The result is a series of contemporary woven artworks that incorporate tradition and craft. Like fractals, stories have endless repeating patterns. Mythologies and fairy tales have been told over and over again for thousands of years, and they will be endlessly repeated—different cultures have their own archetypes in the form of folk tales.

The psychedelic tapestries are a natural step for the object maker and artist who has spent the last seven years at TextielLab in Tilburg, in the Netherlands where he has been perfecting and experimenting with weaving processes he describes as “action-painting with warp and weft”.

Saksi was working and experimenting closely with the textile developers and yarn specialists from TextielLab to find the best material combinations for this project. For this series, he worked with different warps, coloured warps, transparent warps and even black and white warps and experimented with different wefts and bindings to create something extraordinary.

Each rug has a distinctly unique colour palette dedicated to an individual myth. Influenced by illusory states and visual delusions Saksi’s works feature common geometric and pattern-based tropes that lend themselves to the surreal. Oriental rugs, checkerboards, tribal patterns, wallpapers, spiderwebs, mosaics, spirals and swirls—you name it—cover the body of work that consists of 13 pieces each measuring approximately 168cm x 250cm.

The surface designer and graphic storyteller has exhibited at Victoria & Albert Museum, Cooper Hewitt Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, TextielMuseum, Design Museum Helsinki, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Kunsthall Stavanger and Helsinki Kunsthall. Held solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Taipei, Madrid, Brussels, Helsinki and Amsterdam. He has even created commissioned works for Hermès, Nike, Issey Miyake, Ferragamo, Bergdorf Goodman and Marimekko. Ideas of nature seen from the abstracted edge of perception can be found throughout all his work.

Related: Kustaa Saksi’s Rug Collection Inspired by Family Member’s Hypnopompic Hallucinations.

[Images courtesy of Kustaa Saksi. Photography by Jussi Puikkonen.]