Sensitive Structures is the first exhibition in Spain by Danish artist Trine Ellitsgaard, who has lived in Oaxaca (Mexico) for more than three decades. The exhibition brings together textiles, objects, and works on Japanese paper embroidered with horsehair that understand fiber as structure and as archive: a space where design, territory, and memory converge.

Trained in Denmark as a weaver, Ellitsgaard engages with the legacy of Anni Albers by conceiving of textiles as a system of thought capable of articulating rhythm, tension, and variation, but she shifts that tradition toward an experience that is situated and deeply linked to the Oaxacan context.

The artist’s Danish training is evident in the compositional clarity, formal economy, and material honesty characteristic of Nordic design. However, this restraint becomes porous in the face of the symbolic and technical density of the Mexican textile tradition. Ellitsgaard collaborates on some of her projects with artisan communities, such as that of Teotitlán del Valle, the heart of Zapotec textiles, and with workshops at the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, integrating local knowledge and traditional processes into her practice.

In the pieces shown in the exhibition, repetition is an exercise in attention and geometry is a contained breath. The structures do not impose an abstract order but emerge from the dialogue with the material and the processes shared in the workshop. Thus, manual labor is vindicated as a form of embodied knowledge.

Many of the works in the show use recycled or recovered materials, such as fibers extracted from agave or espadin leaves discarded after mezcal production, as well as natural dyes of pre-Hispanic origin, such as cochineal.

This process —which transforms discarded and familiar objects into vessels of memory and beauty— embodies an ethic of sustainability and a respect for natural cycles that is evident throughout the artist’s career. Ellitsgaard’s practice reveals a quiet wonder for matter that confers dignity even on the most humble materials.I

In other pieces, she combines diverse materials —silk, glass thread, rayon, feathers…— that are articulated in organic compositions in which each element retains its uniqueness. The result demonstrates that belonging does not imply uncritical homogeneity, but rather constant exchange.The presence of gold, silver, or copper in Ellitsgaard’s textiles introduces a special luminous vibration, which establishes bridges with the material sensibility of renowned artists such as Olga de Amaral, but from the intimate and minimalist scale proposed by Ellitsgaard.

In the works on Japanese paper embroidered with horsehair, the organic thread pierces and transforms the surface into a punctured body: the line is stitching, memory, and scar. Between resistance and delicacy, between structure and vulnerability, Ellitsgaard’s work stands on a threshold where the material reveals its emotional density and its natural capacity to harbor stories.

Ultimately, in Trine Ellitsgaard’s work, as in all weaving, strength does not reside in a single thread but in the relationship that sustains them: the Danish warp provides clarity and restraint; the Oaxacan weft introduces symbolic thickness and material vitality. It is in this interdependence that the singular power of her work is affirmed.