Susanne Wellm
Weaving Time
- ArtistSusanne Wellm
SØREN SOLKÆR She works with found images from family albums and film stills, working with both personal and collective memory. Through collage, montage and weaving she adds complex, tactile layers of colour, contrast and depth to the expression of the pieces. These poetic works deal with her interest in time, memory and the construction of narrative.
Weaving Time
In an age when most photographs live on glowing screens, quickly swiped past and just as quickly forgotten, Danish artist Susanne Wellm asks us to linger. Her project Weaving Time is both a book and a body of work that transforms the photograph into something tactile, layered, and enduring.
Published by Forlaget Aftryk in 2022, the 158-page bilingual volume (Danish/English) brings together Wellm’s signature practice of reworking photographs through cutting, collaging, and weaving. Found images - family albums, historical film stills - intermingle with her own captures, creating hybrid compositions that feel both intimate and universal. The result is less about recording reality and more about stitching together memory.
“I don’t think of photographs as frozen moments,” Wellm has noted in previous statements. “They are fragments - threads - that can be woven into new stories.” Weaving Time takes this idea literally: in several works, strips of photographic prints are interlaced like fabric, producing images that shimmer, split, and merge depending on how the eye moves across them.
The book’s physicality underscores its concept. Oversized pages, visible threads in the binding, and a deliberate attention to design (by Nicolai Bejder Studio) invite the reader to experience the photographs not as flat reproductions, but as objects with texture and weight. Paired with critical text by writer Lilian Munk Rösing, the publication insists on a slower, more contemplative encounter with images.
What makes Wellm’s work striking is the way it collapses the personal into the collective. A stranger’s childhood snapshot, interwoven with a cinematic fragment, suddenly feels like part of our own cultural memory. Fiction and fact blur. Time bends. Looking becomes a tactile act - the eye wandering through threads, the mind weaving connections.
In today’s visual culture, saturated with ephemeral images, Weaving Time feels almost radical. It is a reminder that photographs are not just surfaces to be consumed, but materials to be worked with, felt, and reimagined.
