Maija Lavonen (FI) – Surface of light

Event Introduction

Note: The work can be viewed free of charge in the lobby of the Design Museum.

Maija Lavonen (1931-2023) was a pioneer of Finnish textile art who renewed herself as an artist throughout her life. In her hands, textile art spread into spatial works. Still in her 70s, Maija Lavonen began a whole new period in her own production with her fibre-optic works. 

In Surface of light, Lavonen has woven linen yarn and acrylic rods on a fibre-optic loom. She has deliberately broken the fibre to give the light reflected from the projector the shape she wants. The work, presented in Lyon, France, in 2009, highlights Lavonen’s curiosity and power of experimentation. 

Maija Lavonen – Hiljaisia monumentteja opens at the Museum of Architecture and Design on 31 January 2025.

Maija Lavonen
Maija Lavonen (1931-2023) was born in the village of Olhava in Ii, Oulu Province. She spent her childhood and youth in Kemi. Between 1953 and 1957 she studied fashion design at the School of Art and Design and painting at the Free Art School in Helsinki. In the 1960s she became an interior textile designer and since the late 1970s she has been known as a textile artist. Monumental, spatial works have been characteristic of her production.

In the 2000s, fibre optics became her main material of choice. The dialogue between traditional textile material and later fibre optics and the surrounding space was important to Lavonen, and it is the architecture of space and light that is the starting point for many of her works.

In co-operation with:

Design- and Architecture Museum

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