Mart Veldhuis

 Hardly ever does tapestry begin as a single, whole image. It is built from many small threads of thought: a word, a symbol, a fragment pulled from someone else's story, repeated and layered until, piece by piece, they resolve into something too large to take in at a glance. Talking to Mart Veldhuis about his creative process follows a similar interlace, circling a subject from small angles before its larger shape comes into view. Translation, thread over thread, is his method. Shared authorship is his starting point. What follows is that same cloth, unwoven, one thread at a time. 

The first thread is flatness, traced to his interest in hieroglyphs and, further back, to the tattoo shops he once hoped to work in. Flat, in his case, describes a style, not a shortage of meaning. "Walking into a tattoo shop is almost like a big symbolic statue made of small images sitting next to each other, forming one big story," he says. It's why his stories begin across from someone else, not alone at a desk. 

Saskia tapestry

The second thread is rhythm, both a way of composing and a way of working. A conversation compresses into a handful of words, sketched and renegotiated until a composition holds; this, he insists, is the real work, not the weaving itself. "Everything has to communicate," he explains. "If it doesn't feel right, I don't move to the next phase." He traces the habit to a short attention span turned method: "I draw a lot of small illustrations that become one big thing." 

Moooi 25 anniversary

The third thread is speed, or his resistance to it. Alongside tapestry, Veldhuis still takes on editorial illustration, quick pieces for newspapers and the like. The brief there is split-second legibility: a reader has to grasp the image before deciding whether to keep reading. "With editorial work, I try to do it as fast as possible," he says, deadlines landing a day or two out and the money rarely following. Tapestry keeps its own time. "I can slow the clock down and reflect more," he says, and the extra time shows up as scale, a piece too big to take in at once, which is precisely the point. "You want people to interpret it in their own way," he adds. 

Being a University

The fourth thread is a frame he's put on his own position over time: not just observer, then interpreter, but eventually participant. His graduation piece, a tapestry built from conversations with people carrying student debt, keeps finding its way back into rooms years after it was finished; a museum recently asked for it again. "It's now 2026, five years later, and it's still relevant," he says. "I get to be a participant in that conversation still." The roles aren't really a sequence so much as a return: the same tapestry, asked back into the room, turns its maker into a visitor. 

The last thread is material. Working with a Jacquard designer, choosing yarns, thickness, how loose or tight the machine runs, is an education still underway, fifty percent complete by his own reckoning: polyester for water's shine, wool for softness, tapestry no longer a support for illustration but a collaborator with its own opinions. In an age of AI, that collaboration is the point. "Real stories that are real, and that need to be heard, translated through a human," he says. Rewoven, that is Veldhuis' practice: translation, insisted on by hand.