Annabelle Binnerts
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 Hopefully Gloomy, 2020
cotton, wool
82 x 106 cm The quilt Hopefully Gloomy is connected to a text work, titled Every Evening. This text originated from research into ecological archetypes in (Western European) folk tales and fairy tales. In these, animals and natural phenomena often have a fixed role and serve a symbolic function: Every fox is cunning and sly, and every winter the land is covered with a thick layer of snow.

In the text, these kinds of metaphors are, as it were, ‘summed up’ in a kind of promise- or prophecy-like form. The phrases in the poem carry something both soothing and ominous in them: on the one hand, a sort of fairytale dream image is described; on the other hand, the reader can question how close this experience of nature still is to our current reality.

Hopefully Gloomy ‘translates’ this text into a textile form. The words allude to the first sentence of the text: ‘Every morning will be hopeful / Every evening will be gloomy’.