Translating the digital language of design into traditional craft: Daniela Doe on tactility, tufting and typography

By adopting the process of traditional crafts such as tufting, embroidery, knitting and printmaking, Malmo-based artist Daniela Doe’s work explores how the elements of graphic design that we normally interact with digitally can transform into something more tactile – like her embroidered animations. Rooted in typography, these moving pieces made on a sewing machine are built frame by frame by taking “single letters and playing with rotation and symmetry to build compositions that move and bounce through the embroidery thread itself”, the artist tells us. These symmetric movements and patterns are wonderfully precise, but still give a meditative nod to the rhythms that arise from hands-on making. Daniela’s more recent experiments with images printed on tracing paper, (later to be drawn over) are playful tests in printing that give flat digital frames a new kind of materiality and texture.

Even when things aren’t moving and designs take on more traditional static forms – like a hand tufted rug – Daniela’s pieces translate everyday patterns and graphics like fruit stickers into images that are rich with colour and a soft movement. “From a distance, they read almost like crisp digital images, even printed posters. Up close, the wool and the small imperfections of the handmade process come through, becoming part of the graphic language itself,” she says. “That shift in perception, between a flat digital image and a large physical textile, is something I keep returning to.”

Unsurprisingly, the artist trained first in fashion design before her MA in Communication Design which is what’s led her to find this symbiosis between textiles, craft and design to build unique visual codes. But it wasn’t just this background in fashion that has steered her interests in fabrication: “I grew up seeing my family work with ceramics, textiles and woodwork, and that stayed with me as a way of working,” she says. “My father is a gardener, and he gave me a passion for noticing small details in flowers and plants, which shows up in the organic shapes and repetition I keep returning to in my work. At the core of it all is an interest in connecting digital and analogue processes, bringing together personal aesthetics, cultural references, and material experimentation.”