Ivanna Rudenko
The most radical thing you can do to wool is nothing at all. Everything I make is that sentence, worked out.
Ivanna Rudenko · at the loom, 2026Ivanna Rudenko directs knitwear from the undyed fleece forward, and films the making when the piece is worth it. Her cloth and her camera argue the same thing: leave the wool alone.
She works both sides of the loom and the lens. Rudenko directs knitwear the way the Materials desk reads it — colour reported from the fibre, never chosen from a book — and when a piece earns it, she is the one behind the camera too.
Her practice is a single argument made in two mediums. At the loom she makes the undyed case in cloth; on a fixed frame she makes it again in film, sitting with the making until the restraint reads as decision rather than absence.
What she carries from fleece to frame
The decisions she keeps at the loom and keeps again on film, each one a refusal of the shortcut.
Colour is reported, not chosen
She grades the fleece by the animal that grew it, long before the loom, and there is no swatch because there is nothing to match. The grey that walks is the grey that arrived, and the notebook keeps the account.
Four hands, one even tension
She weaves at the four-hand loom, two makers reading the tension off a thumb rather than a gauge, so the cloth comes off flat and square from selvedge to selvedge. The second pair of hands buys evenness, not speed.
Film the pause, not the process
When she turns to the camera, she shoots the pause before each beat of the reed, where the decision lives. No voice-over, no music not already in the room: the film keeps the part a photograph loses.
The same argument, in cloth and in film
Rudenko makes the undyed case with her hands, then makes it again with the camera, and the two agree.
She is a maker who happens to film, not a filmmaker who happens to weave, and the order matters. The cloth comes first; the camera is only there to keep the part of the making a finished garment can no longer show.
Watch the film once for the making and once for the hands, she says, and you will have the whole of her argument — which is, in the end, the shortest honest path between the animal and the cloth, kept exactly that short.
| Words | The MARLGREY desk |
| Portrait | Studio Nord |
| Knitwear & film | Ivanna Rudenko |
| Note | Ivanna Rudenko directs knitwear and the MARLGREY films, and spoke on the record. |