Spodnja Idrija, 14–24 Aug 2024
On 14 August, on the evening before the Feast of the Assumption—which is also the local holiday in Spodnja Idrija—we presented to the public a large-format lace piece based on motifs from several Lower Idrija (locally “pr’farska”) legends. There are quite a few of them. The best known is, of course, the one about “the fish that sings on the poplar”—it has at least two versions, male and female, which I placed at the two far ends of the lace. Then there is the story of the Turks carried away by the swollen Idrijca River, the vow that led to the building of the church, and the crafty Pr’farski villager who sold a “singing fish” to a naïve Idrija townsman in exchange for a house…
The red thread that ties all these stories into a whole is the Idrijca River with its eternal flow. The river can also be a metaphor for time, which likewise slowly runs through our lives—through the joyful and the sad, the calm and the turbulent moments of a place and its people, of individuals and the community. That is why, from the very beginning, I conceived the motif in two parts. Below is the unbroken, calm, horizontal current of the river, in which the happenings above it are here and there only briefly reflected. Above, life unfolds as a kind of vertical “timeline” of events that have remained recorded in memory. That is why the upper part of the lace is more detailed, the depictions more naturalistic. The two parts are joined into a whole through the reflections in the river, which in the central section spread onto the banks and pass into the greenery along it.
The lacemakers of Spodnja Idrija translated my vision into lace with their masterful work (which required more than 500 hours and quite a bit of ingenuity!). Let us hope that the lace inspired by the Pr’farska legends will find a permanent home in Spodnja Idrija, from which it will continue to tell its stories to visitors from near and far.