Textile artist Astrid Krogh is one of the Danish artists in the exhibition Matter at Hand – Ten Artists in Denmark, showing at the American gallery Hostler Burrows with locations in L.A. and New York.

Astrid Krogh is a translator, an artist who sees the world through a textile lens. Whether exploring the power of light, the galactic complexity of the universe or the aesthetic ramifications of seaweed, Krogh’s work always springs from a textile approach and mindset. Formally trained in classic textile design, anything can serve as her material; thus she is not restricted to one medium, but seeks to reproduce natural life through patterns, fibers and structures.

Throughout her career, Krogh has worked with light, its patterns and variability, and sought to reflect nature’s tactile mutability – in neon. That may sound contradictory, but it is not, as Krogh’s deep respect for nature and textile craft drives her to create her own interpretation based on layers of knowledge and experimentation. Krogh steers her projects down unknown paths, as when she “weaves” with neon or fiber optics, a novelty when she first set out. Over time, the digital medium has become part of her creative expression, always with a textile foundation. In addition to light, repeated patterns with minor variations have been a recurring theme in her work: in large scale digital wall panels, graphic flowers change color at the same intervals as  the light that moves through the course of a day, or the Milky Way is depicted as a pattern in fiber optics that we can understand and relate to as a wall-hung work of art.

For the past two years, Krogh has turned her artistic eye to the galaxies, seeking to convey the patterns created by light-emitting objects in the universe. She has even consulted with Dr. Margaret Geller of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard, a pioneer in the mapping of the universe. Geller’s work provides a new way of seeing the vast patterns in the distribution of galaxies, such as the Milky Way. In their email correspondence, Krogh found a fruitful and contagious connection between science and art, and her dialogue with Dr. Geller enabled a new practice and understanding of the world.

Krogh’s latest projects, however, turn the gaze inward rather than up, as her work dives beneath the surface of the sea to discover the equally complex world of seaweed and marine plants, which form patterns and connections of which few people are aware. Seaweed and its ramifications are as complex as the galaxies and almost resemble them, with equal parts diversity and regularity. Krogh looks for the regularity in order to disrupt it, to find the repetition and the minute variations that prevent complete uniformity, the tiny ramification that is close to but not quite like the other. Through her constantly evolving experiments she expands her own understanding, delving into unknown worlds to translate and interpret, to share her findings through art that opens our senses and eyes to the beauty and power of nature.