KRJST Studio

KRJST Studio is a Belgian artist duo founded in 2012. The duo has a triangular structure composed by Justine de Moriamé, Erika Schillebeeckx, and their art.

The duo began working in the fashion industry for almost three years after earning a master’s degree from La Cambre Mode(s), the fashion design department of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in Brussels. In 2015, they immersed themselves in the art and design sector due to the need to put creativity at the centre of their practice again. Their works are regularly shown in individual and group exhibitions internationally (e.g. Luxembourg Art Week, Art Paris, Antwerp Art Week, Milan Design Week, Design Basel, PAD) and are included in many private collections. KRJST Studio regularly receives commissions from both private clients and brands like Hermès Paris, & Other Stories, Dyptique and Simone Haag.

Emotions, storytelling and technical expertise are central to the artistic practice of KRJST Studio. The artist duo’s weavings stem from a research work that is rooted in tradition and history, mixing influences of classical and modern art with traditional techniques, which are at the same time adapted and mixed with new technologies in order to reinvent the medium of tapestry, and push forward its visual and formal boundaries. Its works are the result of a constant development around textures, materials, yarns, colours, drawing, painting, as well as 3-D drawing and innovative weaving technologies. KRJST Studio pays special attention to the origin, quality and sustainability of the threads it uses, choosing suppliers who guarantee the highest possible traceability of their products, using natural and recycled fibres and also recovering end-of-stock from the textile and fashion industry. As to the intertwining of traditional manual techniques and new technologies, it occurs from the very beginning of the creative process. The preparatory drawings that precede the creation of each piece are first created as 3-D drawings, which are then printed on textiles, where finally the white spaces are coloured with acrylic paints or pastels. During the weaving phase, the use of machines with the most advanced technology is associated with the simple, primordial gesture of the embroidering hand.

In KRJST Studio’s creative process, experimentation plays a central role at all levels. The artist duo lets the subconscious emerge, lets itself be guided by what materiality and colours suggest. The design is open to the unexpected and adapts accordingly. The slow time of creation allows this continuous readjustment and is the necessary condition, as the duo states, to take “an intimate awareness of time both as the place of change and a place of permanence and as a place of reconciliation between traditional and ritual technique and experimental and modern technique.”

Its works paint with weaving threads mesmerising and mysterious landscapes, characterised at the same time by a certain poetry and tranquility, but also by darker and more tormented atmospheres that arouse in us a variety of sensations and emotions.