Elin Reboli Melberg

Elin Reboli Melberg (b. 1976, Stavanger) works at the intersection of personal experience and social engagement, navigating the tensions between vulnerability and resilience. Over the years, she has explored a variety of techniques, drawn to processes that require both repetition and endurance—methods that allow spontaneity while demanding focus. Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in materiality, where textiles, embroidery, and weaving become both meditative acts and conceptual statements. Trained at Winchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, Melberg initially worked with large-scale installations, intricate sculptures, and mirrored surfaces before shifting towards textiles. Her turn to weaving and embroidery was not merely a technical transition but a response to personal upheavals—a way of grounding herself in the slow, deliberate nature of handcraft. She has since become known for her expansive textile works, blending plant-dyed and synthetic yarns, inherited fabrics, and found materials, often incorporating traces of past generations. Melberg’s process is marked by accumulation. Time, memory, and material intertwine in her works, whether in handwoven tapestries, layered textile sculptures, or embroidered surfaces that bear witness to both loss and renewal. In "Elove" (2014), she embroidered the final text message from her father, a conceptual turning point where grief took form in soft, tactile materials. More recently, her practice has expanded to include plant-dyed yarn, where colors extracted from pine, rhubarb, and tansy merge with synthetic threads, creating a tension between the organic and the artificial—between preservation and transformation. In works like “Etter før. Før etter” ("After before. Before after"), created in response to her mother’s sudden accident, Melberg captures the liminal space between stability and rupture. The weaving itself embodies this transition—the shift from vibrant colors to weightless, unfinished white threads echoing the uncertainty of time suspended. Elsewhere, she has translated MRI scans of her mother’s brain into woven textiles, demonstrating her ability to process trauma through material and form. Beyond her personal narratives, Melberg engages with broader social and political structures. Her participation in the critically acclaimed "Vástádus eana – The Answer is Land" (2021), a textile-based stage design for Elle Sofe Sara’s performance, reflects her commitment to collaborative and activist-driven projects. The production, which won the Kritikerprisen, has been touring internationally, bringing textile traditions into a contemporary, politically charged discourse. Throughout her career, Melberg has drawn inspiration from textile pioneers such as Magdalena Abakanowicz and Synnøve Anker Aurdal, recognizing their ability to transform historically domestic techniques into radical artistic statements. Like them, she embraces imperfection—dropped stitches, tangled threads, uneven weaves—as integral elements of the work itself. Rather than concealing process, she foregrounds it, allowing the work to reveal itself as something fragile yet insistent, delicate yet unyielding. Her works are included in major collections, such as Nasjonalmuseet, Equinor, Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Haugaland Kunstmuseum, and Kistefos, and she has exhibited extensively across Norway and internationally. Whether working on an intimate scale or large immersive installations, Melberg’s art remains a deeply personal and profoundly universal investigation into time, labor, memory, and resilience. - Text by Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo