Cora Jongsma

The Smooth and the Straited (2018/2026)

Felt is in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction; it has neither top nor bottom nor center; it does not assign fixed and mobile elements but rather distributes a continuous variation.
– G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus (1987) 

During the residency Shift Äskhult (2018) I was fascinated by the reconstruction of the agricultural museum landscape around Äskhult. In the active agricultural past, stones were always removed from the land with great difficulty, and it was not until the 1960s that this was done with machines. The landscape reconstruction made the strip fields of the past visible by bringing the stones back into the landscape. 

As a creator of ‘feltscapes’, soft felted cartographic representations, I explored all kinds of meanings and values that stones could have for a farmer and experienced the interaction between draft horses and a whistling farmer while ploughing the land by hand.  

Now, almost 10 years later, land cultivation still forms the basis of my fascination with landscape. Agricultural practices, and ploughing in particular, characterize the particularly fine topology of the landscape. Äskhult is a beautiful example of this. Located on a drumlin, a mountain flattened by ice masses, humans caused further flattening by centuries of ploughing, moving soil and stones to the outer edges of the mountain. 

For me, the history of landscape is a source of research that feeds my imagination about the origins of land. The traces on the surface of the land, the handwriting of farmers and archaeologists, connect us to the past but also force us to face the facts. What have we done to the earth? Our relentless activities for economic gain, exploitation of land that we colonize and subjugate. The grooves and folds in the land bear witness to this.  

– Cora Jongsma

Cora Jongsma is a Dutch artist who uses felt to explore how the land is shaped and cultivated by humans. Through her distinctive method of depiction, she traces the physical structures and lines of the landscape. Her artistic creations—which she calls “felt works”—can be read as material maps of memory reflecting the historical relationship between humanity and the land.

https://www.corajongsma.nl/

The Skift Äskhult residency (2018, Kungsbacka Municipality) explored how we can understand ourselves and our history through contemporary art, utilizing new representations and interpretations of the past. Set against the backdrop of the village of Äskhult in Kungsbacka—which retains its pre-enclosure layout—the artists created new works at the intersection of digital and analog techniques.