Swedish textile artist Ida Pettersson Preutz hand-prints fabric in her studio to chase a very specific feeling: the dizzying, zen-like state of an optical illusion taking hold.
There is a moment when a pattern stops being something you look at and becomes something that looks back. Ida Pettersson Preutz has spent her practice trying to engineer that moment deliberately, using bright colour and geometric repetition to pull viewers into a state she describes as hypnotic, “a zen-like state, yet filled with questions on what is happening.” The paradox of that condition, calm and destabilising at once, is precisely what interests her.
Stripy Stripes is built from triangles. They point in different directions, carry stripes of varying thickness and together produce an image that Pettersson Preutz acknowledges is, by design, a bit messy. The pattern has been with her for years, originating from a large textile patchwork piece and evolving through continued exploration of what the triangle shape can hold. It is a form that sits between the abstract and the representational with unusual ease.
“The triangles could be read as mountains, making the abstract picture a bit more figurative,” she explains. “But then the mountains start to jump around, and you are back to reading them as triangles again.”
That oscillation, the image flickering between readings, is where the optical pull lives.
Everything is hand-printed in her studio, which matters both practically and philosophically. Pettersson Preutz is clear about what that control gives her: every decision about colour remains hers, and colour is her primary tool. The brightness she works with is not decoration but mechanism, the means by which the illusion operates. Getting it right requires the kind of attention that industrial printing cannot offer and that her hands-on process allows.
Stripy Stripes was shown as part of her solo exhibition Lapptäcksfärd at Vandalorum in Sweden in 2023, where the scale of her textile work and the immersive quality of her colour choices had room to do what they are designed to do: draw you in and hold you there, somewhere between mountains and geometry, between stillness and motion.
Ida Pettersson Preutz, born 1989, is a Swedish textile artist and pattern designer.
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Stripy Stripes, hand-printed textile. Exhibition images from Lapptäcksfärd, Vandalorum, Sweden, 2023. Photography: Sara Guldbrandsson.
