Step inside
In A Room of My Own, Inger Johanne Rasmussen opens the door to her textile universe – a space filled with vivid colours, intricate patterns, and layered stories. She works in large-scale formats, creating monumental wall tapestries that command space and leave lasting impressions. Her works appeal instantly through their visual allure, and more profoundly over time, through rich references, personal inspiration and quiet depth.
Whether you are drawn to aesthetic beauty or seeking deeper meaning, Rasmussen’s art invites you in. It offers moments of wonder, emotional resonance, and perhaps even recognition.
Beauty as a strategy
Rasmussen’s works often feature decorative patterns, floral motifs and ornaments. But this is far more than embellishment. She uses beauty as a strategy – a visual language that draws us in and opens the door to greater questions. Behind the seductive surfaces lie existential themes: memory, the body, loss, care and unease. Her tapestries have a physical presence, and many hold stories that reveal themselves gradually, requiring attention and presence.
Patterns with history – from bizarre silks to trompe l’œil
Rasmussen occupies a unique position in Norwegian contemporary art. Her wall tapestries are made using an advanced appliqué technique she has developed over many years. She allows the material’s qualities to shine – both through its tactile surface and the way colours are layered, bleeding into one another to create subtle gradients and tonal transitions.
Many of her motifs feature botanical ornamentation – vines, flowers and foliage – winding across the textile surface, interwoven with geometric, three-dimensional structures that deceive the eye. This technique, known in art history as trompe l’œil (French for “to deceive the eye”), creates visual illusions of depth and volume while remaining flat and textile. This playful tension between perception and material is what makes her work both seductive and disorienting.
Rasmussen also draws inspiration from the extravagant bizarre silks of 18th-century France and England – surreal, asymmetrical silk designs that represented both social status and a playful break from classical form. She channels visual influences from Renaissance architecture and Baroque ornamentation, blending them with a feminist perspective and a deep understanding of textiles as carriers of both cultural heritage and bodily experience.
A space for freedom and experience
The title A Room of My Own refers to Virginia Woolf’s classic essay A Room of One’s Own – a feminist manifesto advocating for women’s right to economic freedom, time, and, above all, a personal space for thought and creation. This perspective is woven throughout Rasmussen’s artistic practice.
Her work elevates textile art as a site for reflection, political consciousness and personal storytelling – often relating to women’s lives and bodily knowledge. She honours the first generation of Norwegian female artists who, from the 1960s onwards, fought to establish textile art as a recognised and autonomous field within the national art scene.
Many of her works are rooted in the domestic – sewing, measuring, working, waiting – translating private gestures and everyday actions into monumental public form. The intimate becomes powerful.
A Southern Norwegian voice with a wide reach
Inger Johanne Rasmussen (b. 1959) was born and raised in Kristiansand and has lived in Oslo since the 1980s. Her studio has long been located on the scenic island of Hovedøya, and she has been active nationally and internationally since the 1990s.
She has exhibited widely across Norway and Europe and is represented in major collections including the National Museum (Oslo), KODE (Bergen), Nordenfjeldske Museum of Decorative Arts and Design (Trondheim), and Kunstsilo – which holds several of her works. Many will also remember her large-scale solo exhibition at Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in 2006–2007.