Textile installation Cubes is based on one of many stories that my grandmother Nika has been telling me about her childhood. These are the tales about the times when people of her hometown were living in a strong connection with their local environment. A lot of their daily tasks took place on the hill above the village. Children hiked up the plateau to pick the pine cones or, in a dialect word, cubes.

This daily routine speaks about the idea of the village people living with their natural surroundings. Through knitting with natural, undyed Slovenian wool I tried to transform this idea into small knitted pieces which represent the pine cones, later connected in a larger textile piece. The shape and placement in the space represent the scenery of my grandmothers’ stories, the video projection adds the colours and texture, taken from the Borovčje plateau.

With the typical look of the Vipava valley, from the diversity of the landscape to the temperament of the Bora wind, it represents the image of my home. Besides the feeling of connection to the land it carries all of the stories that my grandmother used to tell me and the sense of belonging to this place is even more vivid.

The product was created as a project assignment in the course Textile design under the mentorship of prof. Katja Burger Kovič and prof. Marija Jenko at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, University of Ljubljana.