Slow pixels.
In our rush to memorialise landscapes in digital form, we tend to miss the feel and experience of a place. We pixelate it, share it and wait for the likes to ping in to give us the sense of “I was there” satisfaction, but miss the essence of the place. By juxtaposing the improbably slow, laborious process of naturally-dyeing and weaving silk into a structured grid against a hastily-shot photograph, this series of work is a woven metaphor for our increasingly detached interactions with nature, and forms part of an ongoing conversation around how we exist in the world.
Topographies of light.
A single strand of fishing line intersects with a single strand of gold-leaf thread, the weft meandering over the warp without ever breaking contact. By weaving the lines of thread with a light beat and lots of breathing room, the cloth is allowed to undulate and ripple. It throws light and shadow differently from different angles, and allows variations in translucency and opacity through the cloth - topographies of light.
Juxtapose.
Two sets of silk threads are naturally dyed and then woven together to create the canvas: one set of threads is a highly planned mathematically-calculated grid, dyed and wound in a precise order; the other resist-dyed through dips into dye pots in an unplanned, random way. The two sets of threads overlap and intersect continuously as the cloth is woven: the structured order of the grid inevitably becoming undone and dissolved by the organic. This series is a part of an ongoing woven metaphor for our increasingly detached and detrimental interactions with nature, and our desire to have the natural world presented to us in a sanitised, screen-mediated and predictable grid.
Torn wallpaper.
The walls of an old house have born silent witness to generations of people’s lives. Oh the stories they can (and do) tell! This series of woven works evokes the layering of wallpapers in a house - torn, worn away and replaced over time. It illustrates the layering of life, and the damage, decay and considered repair to a house by its occupants over time, each with the goal to make it feel like home.
A single woven piece of cloth binds all the seemingly seperate layers together, just as the four walls of a house unwittingly bind those generations of lives lived within them.
