Milla Novo, an artist working near Amsterdam in the Netherlands, has produced a large-scale fiber art installation titled From Desert Sand to Alpine Snow. The installation is made up of twenty hand-knotted textile panels that function as wallhangings and spatial elements for high-end interiors and cultural settings.
Milla Novo places knotted panels inside an imagined glass pavilion in the Alps
Milla Novo, an artist working near Amsterdam in the Netherlands, has produced a large-scale fiber art installation titled From Desert Sand to Alpine Snow. The installation is made up of twenty hand-knotted textile panels that function as wallhangings and spatial elements for high-end interiors and cultural settings.
The From Desert Sand to Alpine Snow installation expands her contemporary macramé practice into collectible design, combining handcraft, material research and a narrative that moves between real sites and imagined ones.
Milla Novo’s work starts in the studio, where each piece is designed and made by hand to respond to a specific client brief, room proportion or atmosphere. Although her base is in Europe, her visual language is strongly connected to South America, drawing from the cultural memory of the Mapuche people of south-central Chile.
Symbols and geometric codes associated with Mapuche weaving appear throughout her compositions, translated into knot structures and repeating patterns that read clearly at architectural scale.
This lineage is personal as well as aesthetic. Milla Novo’s mother lives in Chile, remains involved in the Mapuche community, and practices traditional weaving techniques.
That ongoing exchange has introduced the artist to patterns with long histories and layered meanings, shaping how she treats ornament as a carrier of knowledge rather than decoration.
From Desert Sand to Alpine Snow was first commissioned for Tanweer Festival (2025) and installed in the Mleiha Desert in Sharjah. Milla Novo built a freestanding framework that allowed the textiles to be experienced as a walk-around field of color and texture, placed directly on the desert ground so the work could register against open sky, pale sand and rocky formations.
The presentation emphasized the physical weight and labor of knotting, making the panels feel less like tapestries on a wall and more like a soft architecture.
Material choice is central to her approach. Alongside fiber and pigment, Milla Novo has developed metallic ropes, including gold, bronze and black, that introduce reflectivity and a sharper edge to the knotwork.
The use of these non-traditional cords shifts macramé away from retro associations and toward a contemporary craft language suited to luxury hospitality interiors, acoustically warm rooms and curated private collections.
After the desert installation, Novo produced a second “site” for the same work through a concept scenario: the panels appear suspended inside a transparent glass pavilion placed in an Alpine snowfield.
The mountain setting is rendered with AI as a visualization, while the textiles themselves remain entirely physical, handmade objects. This pairing lets Novo present her fiber art installations as mobile propositions, works that can be commissioned for real environments, then re-situated through imagery to communicate scale, mood and potential contexts beyond a single event.
By keeping the craft intact and allowing the location to shift, From Desert Sand to Alpine Snow positions textile as both object and environment, and frames macramé as a contemporary medium capable of operating across deserts, galleries, hospitality spaces and speculative landscapes.
All images courtesy of Mila Novo, shared with permission
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