Artcraft is Lovecraft – weaving social inclusion, through the living heritage of the Parklek
(Summer and fall 2025)
Artcraft is Lovecraft – tapestry weaving for social inclusion, aimed to use the cultural and historical significance of the Swedish Parklek to share tapestry weaving as a living, collective practice.
The project was made possible through a 2025+ grant from the Swedish National Handicraft Council (NHF).
The Parklek, originally created in the 1930s as a space entirely for children, a sanctuary in an otherwise adult-centered city, carries a legacy of freedom, play, and experimentation. Rooted in the ideals of Swedish social innovation, it stands as a living cultural heritage: a uniquely model where public care, pedagogy and civic space meet. More than a park and playground the Parklek is a framework of inclusion, a social hub for community initiatives, volunteer engagement, and cultural participation across generations and backgrounds.
The Parklek therefore becomes a natural ground for collective rituals, where performances and workshops weave new threads between body, emotion, community, and place.
Here, weaving becomes a social language: a way to make stories visible, to bring hands together, and to let the tactile open pathways to belonging. Within the Parklek’s open structure, where children, elders, newcomers, and neighbors meet, craft becomes a bridge between generations, between ethnicities, between the individual and the collective, between the everyday and the ceremonial.
The Artcraft is Lovecraft project featured a workshop where participants learned the rya knot, contributed to an open-frame collective weaving, and shared personal weavings brought from home, objects carrying memory and meaning. Participants included long– established Swedish families as well as families newly arrived in Sweden, gathering around thread, story, and touch.
The project evolved through pop-up performances and open-frame weaving sessions in Parklek spaces and other public environments. Over the summer, the tapestries created in each location traveled to the next and the collective weave grew with every stop, thread by thread, park by park. The open frame visited Hässelby; Pl Gulsippan and Stråket, Hägersten-Liljeholmen; Pl Aspudden and Plåtparken, Södermalm and Drakenbergsparken and Rålambshovsparken in Kungsholmen.
The workshop culminated in a shared tapestry, an artistic short film about care expressed through the movement dialogue of hands in participatory making in Parklek, and a wave of new ideas for how to grow the pilot into a new format that brings weaving for social inclusion to even more realms.
When the children’s colors and shapes were finished, the open spaces - the negative forms - were filled with white rags. The white acts like the paper of a child’s drawing: a background that both unites and highlights the colors. The weaving is shapable, almost bodily in its textile character. It can be folded, draped, worn or spread out as a field. At the same time, it carries stories from many playgrounds - fragments of movement, togetherness, and the children’s free expression. The result is an image-world where the white ground embraces the colors of play, just like in a child’s drawing: spontaneous, open, and full of possibilities.
