‘The textile artist Ellie Vossen proved to be a
revelation at the end of last season (...). (...) the
rectangular, plaited works are made of number tapes that have a
width of barely one centimetre and consist of pale cotton ripples
into which the numbers have been woven in red. They could almost
be concrete poems, were it not for the fact that the size and
numbers are primarily treated from a sculptural viewpoint so that
the relief acquires light and shadow. The work looks
extraordinarily sensitive, mostly like pink-tinted miniatures
where the numbers on the back of the tape suggest Arabic script
(....). Ellie Vossen calls her work ‘number tape
weaves’ and it is precisely the word ‘weave’ or
‘tie’ that refers to the reflective side of her
intentions. These weaves/ties can be interpreted not simply on a
formal level. Thinking about it, the small numbers in the
geometric plaiting may refer to cells and community, to an
idealistic gathering. Perhaps this is a bit far-fetched but in
her monumental work 7 plus 1 (which is also at De
Zwarte Panter), the artist has created a spatial tie - with a
concrete basis, an abstract realisation and a somewhat surreal
effect – that suggests countless associative possibilities.
Each plastic container encloses the wild roots of the
‘monad’ that seeks contact with its surrounding
monads. This is a channelled contact because the community must
repulse individual anarchy. In this interpretation, the static,
fixed monad can evoke the image of a leading spirit. But whatever
it may be, an existentialist dialectic has been woven into the
artwork and is a part of its unusual power. Ellie Vossen has no
intention of passing herself off as a philosopher but her
designing, which increasingly focuses on monumentality and
abstraction, includes an inevitable level of reflection and
contemplation.’
Paul de Vree, De Periscoop, September 1976, p. 7, on
the exhibition at De Zwarte Panter, Antwerp
‘Ellie Vossen’s artistic activities are not based
on textiles as a subject matter. Her concepts require supple and
malleable materials and so she opts for textiles as a medium.
This means that she has gained a special place amongst textile
artists. For her, textiles involve an extremely broad concept
that includes many synthetic materials such as plastic and even
paper. Her working method consists of initially developing
small-scale models that serve as a way of researching materials
and as an exercise for intuiting the textiles she will use. Ellie
Vossen experiences the creating of an artwork as being first and
foremost a discipline. The realisation of a basic idea is
subjected to a sensory assessment: you can see it and you can
feel it. To achieve this with an optimal effect, the imposed
norms must be strictly adhered to while realising a project. Only
then will the result be satisfying. Her art is not based on
singing colours or a sparkling imagination; it is the silent
witness of her logical and constructive mind that is revealed in
an austere aestheticism.’
Jan Walgrave, Contemporary Textile Art in Flanders
(catalogue), Museum Maihangen, Lillehammer, Norway,
August-September 1979
The poetic creations of Ellie Vossen
I can clearly remember my first conversation with Ellie
Vossen. It took place at her home on the Mercatorstraat in
Antwerp when we were preparing the Contemporary Ceramics and
Textile Art from Antwerp exhibition that was held at the
De Sterckshof Museum in Deurne-Antwerp in the summer of
1974. It was a winter’s day and the beautiful but vicious
cat of Asian extraction was out of sorts. I wanted to stroke her
but ended up with a claw stuck painfully into my hand.
Ellie was not only extremely obliging she even came up with a
suggestion that scared the hell out of me. Her Variable
Situation consisted of a pair of short but enormous
cylinders, a number of long tubes including one that was three
metres high, and a mountain of strings. Naturally all of this was
made of textiles that predominantly consisted of jute. I had
difficulties with this because I was still at the very beginning
of my concern and familiarity with the evolution of what was then
known as contemporary ‘arts and crafts’ that was
becoming an expression of the fine arts. The council in the
province where I lived had bounced me into being the
representative of the Belgian National Commission for Arts and
Crafts, which mainly consisted of rather conservative ladies and
gentlemen who were still dreaming of a revival of traditional
lace-making and the weaving of wall hangings. Later that year, I
would be sent off to the conference of the World Crafts Council
in Toronto. An excellent and revealing exhibition of the new
material art had been organised for the occasion with work from
the international stars of textile art such as Sheila Hicks, Anne
Terdjan, Olga de Amaral, and Peter and Ritzi Jacobi. In 1975, I
curated the Arts and Crafts of Benelux exhibition at the
Sterckshof, which involved me visiting the studios of Dutch
textile artists who had had a great deal of contact with the
international movement of contemporary textile art. That same
year I visited the Septième Biennale Internationale de la
Tapisserie Contemporaine for the first time in Lausanne,
where Ellie was showing her monumental 7 plus 1, a
continuation of the Variable Situation of 1974. Gradually
I began to understand what she was doing.
It was quite obvious in this context that Ellie had been
intensely involved for some time now and that this involvement
was based on her fine art background rather than on an interest
in textiles. She had developed quite rapidly into one of the most
fascinating artists to use textiles as her medium. What I mean
here is that she first hatched a concept and developed a subject
where textiles probably played a role in her subconscious, but
that this process began each time with a naked idea that involved
a quest for a suitable medium to imbue it with form. The fact
that she almost always ended up choosing a form of textiles
indicates a certain predestination but this should certainly not
be considered as her only possibility. She had an exceptionally
wide interpretation of the concept of textiles, and her materials
could as easily include plastic or paper. Ellie frequently used
existing products such as number tape or paper handkerchiefs,
which were combined as a grid, as an interweaving that exuded
simplicity and restraint. She talked about Stacks, a term
which referred to the many thoughts that went through her head
when she was working on her extremely disciplined art rather than
to the materials that she had gathered together. For her,
creating an artwork primarily involved adopting a discipline. The
concept had to stand the test of being confronted with the senses
so that its material realisation still had to reflect what she
wanted to express – something that would be impossible
without a strict working schedule. What initially involved cool
structuring, then came to life as a sensitive artwork that
rejected formal hyperbole and lyrical outpourings in favour of a
modest order, beneath which you could feel the subdued
sensitivity. In other words: the artwork expressed something
other than textiles. Despite the use of a specific material, a
language was deployed that distanced the viewer from that
material and made him adopt a view inherent to the raw materials
in the background. This in turn referred to another idea that had
nothing to do with textiles: an abstract concept, a generality
and a greater theme.
These principles and her oeuvre’s construction meant
that Ellie Vossen was one of a kind in Flanders. The monumental
works of other artists working with textiles, including those of
Lieva Bostoen, Jacques de Groote, Liberta, Veerle Dupont and
Hetty van Boekhout, essentially concern the textiles themselves.
It was perhaps for this reason that Ellie Vossen did not
participate in many exhibitions with other textile artists. She
preferred to seek out a different context and showed both on her
own and with other artists at Antwerp’s De Zwarte
Panter gallery and the International Culture Centre.
Ellie Vossen was one of the few artists to use textiles in an
extraordinary way and she was able to ‘spiritualise’
her materials by adding different dimensions. Her art relates to
the work of the artists who participated in the
Stofwisselingen exhibition that was held in Haarlem in
1979. Here, the Dutch title is a pun that can be read as meaning
both ‘metabolisms’ and ‘textile
variations’, and the various aspects of this concept were
illustrated in experimental productions. Ellie Vossen also had
her own ideas about what textiles could imply and this primarily
involved the way in which their sublimated presence could imbue
her view of life with form.
The heyday of contemporary textile art has come and gone. The
navel of this ‘movement’, the International Biennale
in Lausanne closed its doors for the last time in 1995. Although
that’s a pity, it does mean that textile art is now no
longer confined to a ghetto as it used to be. Nowadays when
artists deploy textiles as their medium, their work no longer
evokes associations with applied art. But that was always true of
the modest, poetic creations of Ellie Vossen.
Jan Walgrave , 2004