Letter from Matilda Norberg, Head of design
August 2021

We have always been proud to be making in Ytre Arna. But this past strange year, it has felt more important than ever, with almost everything else in flux due to the pandemic.

The concept of making, the making itself, was the starting point for this collection. Our making, and that of people around us. We are makers, not just at the factory, but in private too. Maryanne, our production manager, knits doll’s outfits for all and everyone’s kids as she gets home from work. Our seamstress Ina makes tiny villages out of painted driftwood. There are great nail decorators, national costume makers, second-hand furniture fixers, artistic firewood staplers and quilters here with us as well.

I found a maker’s muse in the French/American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. She was a self-taught painter and monumental sculptor, that started making art as a way of coping with a personal crisis. Amongst her first works in the early 1960’s, were the angry and violent performances “Tirs” where she used a firearm to shoot paint onto her artworks. Saint Phalle worked with womanhood as a theme throughout her career, the different roles of women – brides, child-bearers, witches and prostitutes. Her colourful, whimsical and monumental sculptures “Nanas”, made over the course of four decades, has been a great inspiration for Oleana AW21.

We reached out to other makers around us. Together with Norlender, a family-run knitwear factory on the next island from Ytre Arna, we made a jacket and a collar in Norwegian wool. The Tveiten family have been making classic Norwegian fisherman’s sweaters for almost 100 years.

Making is about being fearless. Being radical. Sometimes even being a bit aggressive. Oleana AW21 ‘We are makers’, is an homage to creativity, to making your statement, to doing stuff.