Katharina Wahl | Obese Door/Voluptuous Door

Katharina Wahl has used 20 metres of Divina fabric to build a diversely layered, flexible, heavy, freestanding slab, called a lardboard – a chimaera of door and curtain. Each of the seven layers was embroidered with a line grid as a reference point for the rest of the stitching. Then starting at one end, the layers were sewn through from top to bottom over and over again, a process a little like sewing together the pages of a book.

“Doors conceal layers but are covered with a closed surface which presents as a massive homogenous material. There’s a beauty in the inner structure of a door that I wanted to make central to the aesthetic approach of this project,” says Wahl. “I translated these internal functional structures which are usually hidden into the luxurious and beautiful Divina fabric.”

A trained potter and graduate of the Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design, Katharina started to work as a designer in 2007. A major element of her work is the design of textiles, wallpaper, and flooring, often applied as illustrative elements within architecture. She has worked with designers, architects and artists in Germany and the Netherlands, and has been a tutor at the product design department of Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design since 2013.