Aliki van der Kruijs

PROJECTS

Luminous Ground

Connecting soil to horizon to textile

Dear Soil,

Field research in which a plot of land in the Betuwe area (NL) is visited a year round to sense its tones, rhythms and cycles.

Orde.Kosmos

A publication compiled with materials collected over 12 years.

1cm = 1000 years

One centimeter of limestone is — on an average — a compression of 1000 years material and time. This project investigates the notion of scale and time in the formation of the Earth through tapestry.

The Weathering Weaver

Documenting spring, summer and autumn through textiles colored with soil.

Hello Waters

A walk with water

Moonside of a Seed

Collective drawing waterstories as part of the traveling residency ‘Ukiyo — The Water Way’.

Bathing into Being

A space made to create colour baths. Colour baths to be immersed in purely colour after meditation sessions.

Made by Rain

Made by Rain is a textile register of rain fall at a specific location. The textiles form a collection of weather data: visual recordings of a drizzly day or even a monsoon, imprinted on textile.

Made by Rain — Porcelain

Kadans 2.0

A textile sea archive.

Afterseason

A research publication and sampling collection on the possible value system of waste ink from the textile print industry.

Weathering Blue

The project Weathering Blue (Weer Blauw) is a visual record of colour and seasonal change made tangible. The blue shirts on the clothesline changed over the course of months of hard blue to lighter blue.

Nawa — Porcelain

To interlink textile and ceramics, ropes are used 1:1 to model ceramic forms and surfaces.

Focus

The condition of air is measured.
Colours arise.

Dear Jungfrau

The woven book Dear Jungfrau resonates the formation of the Jura mountain area, that was once the bottom of the sea and raised upwards with tectonic forces shaping the Alps.

Twilled Waves

A research to (colour) transition zones through weaving techniques inspired by the phases of the moon.

Nawa

How a line settles in a story. Study on indigo and Kurume-kasuri during a craft-exchange research trip to Japan.

Living Fossil

Reflection on the Japanese katazome stencil-printing proces. The katazome master became a gardener, by coming to a proces using real ginkgo leaves creating a repetition without a repeat.

Botanical Habit

An imprint of plants in the VU Hortus Botanicus. The visual descriptions of the plants is made by the plants themselves; Botanography.

On Colour

COMMISSIONS

Sún for the Sun

Solide

Via Colour

Veer

Sky Dial

Think Like Clouds

Spirit from the Sky

Daylit

The Curtain Show

Model of Nature

Beyond the Monstera

Technical botanical language. Visual grammar research guided by the Monstera deliciosa.

NEWS

‘Notes on Weather’ for Maharam Stories

Posted on July 15, 2025

On invitation of Maharam I wrote an essay about the experience and collected materials during a residency in NYC, February 2024. You can read the essay here.

The book Orde.Kosmos online to order!

Posted on May 12, 2025

Orde.Kosmos retraces the work of textile artist Aliki van der Kruijs since the beginning of her studio practice in 2012. The book compiles scans of her research archive, accumulated and carefully assembled over the years in twenty-four different folders. The different layers of notes, annotations, drawings, mind maps, fabric samples, newspaper clippings, are a witness through time to her ideas, processes and inspirations. The book aims to offer a generous and never seen before insight into her practice and invites the reader to wander through her singular way of thinking and creating.

Available through Ness Books and Antenne Books.

Launch publication Orde.Kosmos

Posted on March 19, 2025

BOOK LAUNCH
“ORDE.KOSMOS”
Aliki van der Kruijs
27.03.25 19h–21h30
Signing & drinks

Espace Ness – 9 pass. St Pierre Amelot, Paris

Orde.Kosmos retraces the work of textile artist Aliki van der Kruijs since the beginning of her studio practice in 2012. The book compiles scans of her research archive, accumulated and carefully assembled over the years in twenty-four different folders. The different layers of notes, annotations, drawings, mind maps, fabric samples, newspaper clippings, are a witness through time to her ideas, processes and inspirations. The book aims to offer a generous and never seen before insight into her practice and invites the reader to wander through her singular way of thinking and creating.

Book details
Title: Orde.Kosmos
Author: Aliki van der Kruijs
Language: Dutch and English
Format: 20,8 x 16 cm, 672 pages
Printing: CMYK offset, 600+ color ills.
Binding: Sewn bound, silkscreen fabric cover, 2 covers
Price: 40€ / ISBN: 978-2-9594887-2-6
Distribution: Ness Books or Antenne Books (in a few weeks)

Made possible with the support of Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie and Jaap Harten Fonds.

Waterway.blue — A wet diary

Posted on May 5, 2024

Together with food designer Céline Pelcé (FR) we are currently researching the water ways in Japan during a traveling residency. The aim is to use textiles, food and words as a medium to support interactive local encounters and explore ways to behave like water, embracing movement and flexibility towards contemporary issues.

Expanding the research and using different tools, a series of encounters with locals, creatives, farmers, botanists and natural resources create a moment around the idea of water as a metaphorical foundation. This website functions as a subjective diary to share these encounters.

www.waterway.blue

New work at Zuiderzee Museum, Enkhuizen

Posted on April 20, 2024

Invited by the Zuiderzee Museum and guest-curated by Tracy Metz, a follow up of the project Weathering Blue (2011) will document the spring, summer and autumn of 2024 through textiles. In 2011 the colour of ultramarine, a pigment —— used to be an element in the washing craft from a steamlaundry —— is in 2024 replaced by different colour of soil. The soil patterns are exposed to the weather conditions, creating a palette of mineral colored textiles.

With an interactive installation, Het Wevende Weer / Weaving Weather, I show how the weather, and the cycle of water, interstitially mark into daily lives. The installation invites visitors to note the day’s weather, creating a common weather diary. This notation system is developed together with Renée Rooijmans.

23 April till 31 October 2024, Zuiderzeemuseum Enkuizen, NL

Ukiyo — The Water Way

Posted on March 27, 2024

After two years swimming in parallel waters, I’m very exited to finally start a collaboration with Céline Pelcé.
Soon we’re gonna take off to Japan, spending April and May 2024 in movement, collecting sensations and materials about the Floating worlds. Stay tuned!!
.
‘Ukiyo, the water way’ is a project supported by Creatieve Industrie Fund NL and Institut Français.

Video portrait of the studio

Posted on March 1, 2024

In mid-January Rik Komáromi visited the studio of Aliki van der Kruijs. In two mornings she talked very openly about her work and shared her archive and thoughts.
On one of these mornings Rik filmed this video. Rik: “It was special to be able to get so close to her work and make this personal portrait of her.”

Made by Rain in Pioneering Ceramics

Posted on February 5, 2024

Starting on 16 February 2024, the Museum Prinsenhof Delft will present the exhibition Pioneering Ceramics. Pioneering Ceramics places masterpieces from the museum’s collection side by side with the work of contemporary makers. An exciting dialogue and exceptional insights are the result. Pioneering Ceramics presents multiple points of view and narratives, and invites visitors to look at the past from a contemporary perspective. The porcelain editions of Made by Rain are part of the show!

Till 8 September 2024 — www.museumprinsenhofdelft.nl

Photo’s: Marco De Swart

Choreographed Events

Posted on September 4, 2023

Our work Kadans 2.0 can be seen in the form of a spatial tapestry and a sample study during the exhibition Choreographed Events at Garage Rotterdam — Curated by Bogomir Doringer

02/09/2023 – 05/11/2023

The interactive artworks in Choreographed Events may be choreographed by various factors. It could be the curator or artists behind this exhibition who have created the activations for you, it might be technology or algorithmic processes choreographing the activations. Or you might be the choreographer within this exhibition, because of your presence and interaction with the artworks.

Artists: Aliki van der Kruijs & Jos Klarenbeek, Heleen Blanken, Harm van den Dorpel, Jeppe Lange, Nanno Simonis, Studio Moniker and Sweet Scope.

Foto: Aad Hoogendoorn

Best Dutch Book Design 2021

Posted on April 15, 2022

Very happy that the publication Afterseason is selected for the Best Dutch Design Books 2021 by the student jury selection. The publication is made in collaboration with graphic designer Dayna Casey. It collects the research of the project Afterseason and shows the many collaborations I had in the expedition to investigate how in different (creative) disciplines the residual ink from the textile print industry can be applied. The book has the format of 12 double-sided posters hold together by an elastic accompanying an afterword by Ruby Hoette.

Edition of 100 / €22
It’s available at the (book)stores of Stroom Den Haag and the Textielmuseum.
Also you can order it directly by email.

New work for the exhibition To Dye For in Textielmuseum

Posted on April 15, 2022

Two new works of Afterseason are part of the just opened exhibition To Dye For. The research Afterseason investigates the possibility of processing residual ink from the textile print industry into new raw materials, so that the chemical waste is limited. In my research I analysed various shades of black/purple, derived from for example, shellfish, sandalwood and residual ink. The deep purple, black colour of the waste stream could be part of the subset of black print inks. The two new works show the richness of this colour and can be seen as pamphlets to (re)introduce this ink as a usable material in the proces of printing on textile.

About the exhibition:
Discover the world of textile dyeing in the exhibition ‘To Dye For’: from the origin of dyes and the stories behind them to their impact on people and the environment. The exhibition To Dye For provides a glimpse of the beauty and dilemmas of colour in textiles. You can learn about the challenges that artisans, artists, designers and scientists have faced over the years as well as the creative solutions they have found.

To Dye For, Textielmuseum Tilburg
9 April till 2 October 2022

Website Kadans 2.0

Posted on October 17, 2020

www.kadanskadans.com

A brand new website that shares research, software and textiles from the ongoing project Kadans 2.0.
In collaboration with Jos Klarenbeek.

The last two years, our curiosity towards the motion of the North Sea and if this can be a direct source for an ever-changing weaving pattern constructed a body of work that is collected in this website!

Textile production is combined with sciences including oceanography and mathematics, constructing a soft output of hard data generated by the motions of waves at sea.

In collection of Cooper Hewitt

Posted on March 18, 2020

A colour blanket for the Made by Rain product development is now part of the textile collection of the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in NYC. The piece was on display at the SATURATED exhibition in 2018/2019.

You can also see the work in their online catalogue!

ABOUT

Aliki van der Kruijs is a textile designer and researcher. She questions and visualises the relationship between the natural world, colour and space, with a strong focus on material narratives. Her textile and spatial works are relational to time, place and landscape. The weather and geology, land, the water and its cycles are the elements in almost all her projects.

Her practice is based on an intuitive encounter with the world through fieldwork. Many of her projects originated on or in response to a location, phenomena, natural (re)sources or a specific technique with a strong sense of coloring processes.
In her visual grammar space is created in which natural elements such as rain, the sun, heat or soil edit material and generate meaning. The works can be seen as publications about her continuous explorations to the living library of Earth and the material and spiritual culture of its inhabitants.

After finishing her master’s in applied art at the Sandberg Institute, she established her own studio in 2012. She often initiates research projects and collaborations herself, the results of which are shown in the Netherlands and abroad.

In 2020-2021, she took part in the residency program at the Jan van Eyck Academie, an international post-academic institute for visual arts, design and reflection in Maastricht.

Aliki is an alumni from the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. She graduated with a MA in Applied Art at the Sandberg Instituut and a BA in fashion design from the ArtEZ University of Arts.

She collaborates with fashion designers and architects to apply her materials and worked with companies and institutes like Nike, Wolf-Gordon, Zig Zag Zurich, Sandberg Instituut, Het Nieuwe Instituut as well. She was part of the Weavers Werkstatt, a project by Jongeriuslab. For further information or request for collaboration feel free to contact: info(at)alikivanderkruijs.com