Q&A with Erna Einarsdóttir

What was your initial reaction when you read the brief?

“It is pretty clever to not let all these things go to waste and, coming from Iceland, I think we could have used a project like this over here. I am sure  many things are getting thrown away from empty offices in Iceland.”


How did you come to your proposal?

“I was thinking about how worthless dish towels are–they are one of the few textile based items that we purposely don’t care about staining and making dirty. It’s the purpose of the towel to clean up after us in the kitchen and I never see a used towel that doesn’t have some kind of stains in it. So I thought it would be nice to make something that would make the towels more ‘worthy’, and that they would lose this ‘towel’ feeling and become something completely new.

I think most people have thrown a dish towel over their shoulders after cleaning the dishes so I felt it would be nice to keep that element. Now they can still throw the towels over their shoulders but this time they won’t feel like it´s just another worthless towel.”

Did you surprise yourself with your outcome?

“I am definitely surprised that I could take a dish towel and make something nice from it. I would never have chosen to work with it in any of my work.”