Tomáš Mikolaj
Silvia Geringová, awarded with the title of Master of Folk Art Production last year, grew up in Bratislava in a family which knitted a lot. In the 1960s, the techniques of knitting and crochet were generally fashionable; magazines such as Burda and Dorka inspired many women, and Silvia Geringová was no exception. Although she studied Computation in Economics and Mathematics at the Faculty of Management of the University of Economics in Bratislava and worked as an economist, after 1989 she began knitting jumpers alongside her employment. When in 1999 the Centre for Folk Art Production began to offer courses for the public in the newly-established ÚĽUV School of Crafts, she attended a course in wood and painting on glass. Later, as a teacher of painting on glass at the folk festival in Východná, she met a girl who was felting wool with children. She had not known this technique until then, and it fascinated her. She began her discovery of felting, and still devotes herself to it today.
Silvia Geringová’s current method of work is characterised by the alternation of various techniques, and the search for new challenges. She has many sources of inspiration: she can spin, weave on a loom (and also warp and stretch the warp), knit using needles or a loom and felt. Her specialist knowledge has made her self-sufficient, since she can create a finished woollen product from the very beginning of its processing as a raw material.