Raiments: by Lærke Ryom

Lærke Ryom’s practice is rooted in the idea of dressing furniture rather than upholstering it. The exhibition title Raiments, an archaic term for garments, reflects this understanding of dress as both a material gesture and a conceptual position. Traditional upholstery relies on tension and force, stretching and stapling textiles into rigid forms. Ryom instead approaches textiles like a tailor: designing garments that sit comfortably on the structure, allowing the material’s natural drape and character to remain visible. The softness in Ryom’s designs is a conscious slowing of form and gesture in a world that favours speed and efficiency. Her work resists the disciplining of materials, allowing textiles to fall, settle, and negotiate their place. In this exhibition, the garments are made of wool and hand-stitched by the designer, embedding care directly into the work's construction.

 

This relationship between frame and textile echoes philosopher Michel Serres’s notion of hospitality as mutual transformation. To host is to accept change. In Ryom’s work, the furniture frame becomes such a host: it offers structure and support while relinquishing control. The textile arrives not as an ornament, but as a guest with agency, draping and eventually reshaping the body it inhabits. What emerges is an object formed through care rather than command, where softness is an ethical refusal of control.

 

This refusal challenges the hierarchies inherited from functionalist modernism, in which structure was privileged as truth and softness was relegated to decoration. In her work, the textile is not a finishing layer but a formative element; softness is not a weakness, nor is comfort opposed to intellect. By dissolving the divide between construction and sensibility, her furniture insists that tactility, intimacy, and the body are not secondary concerns, but central to how objects acquire meaning and presence in the world.

 

At Innenkreis, this position reaches beyond the single object, and hospitality unfolds across time. The exhibition space becomes a site of reciprocal hosting, where historical works do not simply frame the new but receive it. In turn, Ryom’s garments shift how these older forms are perceived, softening stone and quietly rebalancing the structure between old and new.