Margot Van den Berghe

Margot Van den Berghe creates a world of textile where the distinction between art and design no longer exists. Her work can take the shape of small, delicate wall pieces, a modular public seating area or even a boat sail. Just like textiles run through our language, the common thread (see?) running through her work is a personal visual language, an alphabet consisting of shapes and colours. It de- and reconstructs textile as a medium, playing with positive and negative space, with the front and back of a piece, with textures, depth and layering. If you learn to read her poetic language, you will start to understand the stories she tells about textile as a surface, a space, an industry, a craft, a continuous process of becoming.

Through this process, Margot keeps expanding her in-depth knowledge of artisanal and industrial textile techniques. It has led her to work primarily with residual materials that she patiently collects, such as deadstock yarns, industrial cutting waste or even the leftover fluff from her own studio. In an almost alchemical way, they are transformed into valuable textile pieces. By staying true to her intuition, Margot expands a common understanding of textile circularity from a material to a conceptual question too.

During her studies at the Textile department of LUCA School of Arts Ghent, Margot Van den Berghe worked as an intern for Klaas Rommelaere on his Dark Uncles exhibition at the Kortrijk textile museum Texture. Since graduating in 2021, Margot’s work has been exhibited at Theater Aan Zee (Ostend), Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven), C12 (Brussels) and Design Fest Gent. She also completed a residency at Pilar (Brussels) and is currently developing new work for and with Huis Perrekes, a visionary care centre for people living with dementia.