Weaving migraine visions into psychedelic tapestries

A migraine, says Kustaa Saksi, is like an unexpected visit from an irritating old friend. A sudden attack upends your plans; causes havoc; you never know when it will leave.

The 48-year-old Finnish textile artist has lived with these repetitive, immobilising headaches and their accompanying visual disturbances — ranging from partial blind spots to borderline hallucinations — since childhood.

“It usually happens on the side of my eye, then it’s like a sun, travelling from east to west,” he says. “At one point it will take over my whole vision, then it vanishes.”

Like Saksi, I have experienced migraines since childhood. Some last for hours; some for days. And so I was curious to see In the Borderlands, his latest exhibition at the Design Museum in Helsinki, for which Saksi has turned his visions from disorientating moments between reality and illusion into hyper-real, almost psychedelic jacquard tapestries.

The intention, he says, is somewhere between overcoming his fear of his condition and finding beauty within it.

“Migraines make me feel horrible,” he says, as he shows me around a display of acid-bright, woven-fantasy landscapes made between 2013 and 2023. “But they also give me something unique, a visual side. There are interesting in-between states during attacks, somewhere between a dream and reality where I enter a strange world of hallucinations.”

“It helped to dig deep into attacks and try to understand them.”

I had never thought of migraines as beautiful before. But Saksi’s migraine series of six enormous tapestries, included in the exhibition with titles such as “Aura”, “Attack”, “In Full Bloom” and “Aftermath”, are both gloriously decorative and strangely reassuring, familiar representations of the florid visual disturbances I have experienced.

Migraines are a neurological disorder, partially hereditary. According to the American Migraine Foundation, only about a third of people who live with them experience the visual disturbances known as auras.

For me, an aura involves shimmering, zig-zag flashes, blanks in my visual field and muddled speech, which, in simple terms, is usually attributed to neural activity in the parts of the brain. There is no cure; sufferers just have to live with them.

Saksi, too, sees zig-zag flashes. But he also sees visions akin to wider landscapes. One tapestry resembles a thick, fertile forest of alien mushrooms; another looks like an enormous pulsating blood vessel. They are impossible scenes, something like computer-generated fractal fantasies, albeit woven in luxurious yarns with endless possibilities in terms of their combinations.

“I try to build a microcosmos, a piece where you can zoom deep inside,” he says.

Another tapestry collection on display, “Hypnopompic”, illustrates an hallucinogenic state called hypnopompic dreams, in which the subject cannot tell the difference between dream and reality, which can be an extremely frightening experience. Saksi has interpreted the visions described by a relative with the condition in anxious tapestries depicting screaming bats, menacing spiders and underwater worlds.

John Quin, a retired consultant physician and endocrinologist, is another migraine sufferer. A chapter in his forthcoming book, Video, explores how contemporary artists deal with neurological conditions.

Quin says works of art like Saksi’s tapestries in Helsinki can be “profoundly reassuring” for sufferers like me. “To understand that visual disturbances are a standard feature, and you are not alone, it doesn’t have to portend something horrendous.”

Theorists have long tried to explain how the work of artists, from Hildegard of Bingen to Van Gogh, was charged by visual disturbances caused by neurological conditions. The neurologist Oliver Sacks believed Hildegard’s religious visions in the 12th century were “migrainous”. The metaphysical morbidity of Giorgio de Chirico and the illusory split fields in Picasso’s paintings have been the subjects of migraine theory, too.

They are, of course, just theories — no one can diagnose a condition retrospectively with certainty. Saksi is unusual in that his migraine condition is asserted in his work.

His tapestries are made in jacquard, a weaving technique developed in the early 1800s by the French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard. “I use exactly the same technique, but now it’s possible to control the look through a computer to make very dense, complex structures out of yarns,” says Saksi, who originally trained as a graphic designer.

He is based in the Netherlands and works on specialist looms in a textile laboratory in Tilburg, where he mixes natural yarns, like alpaca and wool, with synthetics such as lurex and even rubber — “combinations for strange results” — and combines hand-drawn images with digital illustrations.

Prices for one-off commissions start at about €20,000; Saksi says he often designs them for private houses. They are a little outside my price range, but seeing his wild tapestries on display in Helsinki is somehow intensely reassuring. Next time my irritating old friend returns, I will be ready.

‘Kustaa Saksi: In the Borderlands’ is at the Design Museum, Helsinki until October 15. designmuseum.fi

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