process: sourcing yarn from unraveled secondhand sweaters (cotton and wool), embroidery and found materials (protective mesh for produce) on bubble wrap
Cementa22 is just around the corner and the emergency blankets are nearly ready. Here are some detail shots of each blanket and one detail shot of the mylar backing.
I will be exhibiting these blankets and performing live at Combamalong Studios as part of my Emergency Blankets project for Carnivale Catastrophe @carnivale_catastrophe, presented by Modern Art Projects Blue Mountains @modernartprojects at Cementa22 @cementafestival 19-22 May, 2022.
Carnivale Catastrophe is proudly assisted by the Australian Government @ausgov through the Festivals Australia program, Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal @frrr_aus, and NAB Foundation @nab. Emergency Blankets is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW @creatensw.
Curator: Fiona Davies Exhibition Manager: Lizzy Marshall Invited Artists: Fiona Davies, Rhonda Dee, Beata Geyer, Anne Graham, Tom Isaacs, Kenneth Lambert, Sean O’Keeffe, Ebony Secombe.
Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens) - Cecilia Vicuña
“Although better known as a poet in her adoptive North American home (she has lived in New York since the 1980s), Cecilia Vicuña has stayed true to her youthful calling as a genre-bending visual artist for more than forty years, and her site-specific projects highlight the artist’s talent for composing poems in space, for a visceral lyricism in three dimensions. Vicuña refers to these particular works as ‘quipoems’—a contraction of poem and quipu; an online dictionary defines quipu, rather reductively, as ‘a device consisting of a cord with knotted strings of various colors attached, used by the ancient Peruvians for recording events, keeping accounts, etc.’ A pre-Columbian type of writing, in other, more poetical words—product of a literary tradition that has given the world such luminaries as Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Nicanor Parra. Vicuña, who was born in 1948 in Santiago de Chile, is supremely aware of the weight of Indigenous history anchoring twentieth-century Latin American culture.
“Blown up to the monumental proportions of immersive ‘soft sculpture,’ her recent Athenian quipoem consists of giant strands of untreated wool, sourced from a local Greek provider, dyed a startling crimson in honor of a syncretic religious tradition that, via the umbilical cord of menstrual symbolism, connects Andean mother goddesses with the maritime mythologies of ancient Greece.”
“Every Passover when the Cohens set their table for the traditional Seder meal, they took out something reserved for their table alone—a matzah cover woven for them by experimental textile artist Anni Albers. ‘It sat on the table next to my father, or my mother after he died,’ says Tamar Cohen, daughter of Elaine Lustig and Arthur Cohen, who gifted the custom-made ritual object to New York’s Jewish Museum in 2021.″
Photo by Steve Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation.
“When enslaved women from the rural, isolated community of Boykin, Alabama—better known as Gee’s Bend—began quilting in the 19th century, it arose from a physical need for warmth rather than a quest to reinvent an art form. Yet by piecing together scraps of fabric and clothing, they were creating abstract designs that had never before been expressed on quilts.
“These patterns and piecing styles were passed down over generations, surviving slavery, the antebellum South, and Jim Crow. During the Civil Rights movement in 1966, the Freedom Quilting Bee was established as a way for African-American women from Gee’s Bend and nearby Rehoboth to gain economic independence. The Bee cooperative began to sell quilts throughout the U.S., gaining recognition for the free-form, seemingly improvisational designs that had long been the hallmark of local quilt design. As awareness grew, so did acclaim, and the quilts entered the lexicon of homegrown American art.”
I wrote an artist’s statement for the exhibition catalogue:
Tehom (the Deep) is a way of thinking through my experience of anxiety and depression, and of expressing my desire for healing, whether medical or spiritual. This work draws from religious and spiritual understandings of water as a healing or cleansing element. ‘Tehom’ is a Hebrew word, used in the opening lines of the book of Genesis to refer to the primordial, abyssal waters of creation, shrouded in darkness and waiting for the transformative word of God. This work is also informed by the psychoanalytic theories of the death drive and melancholia, according to which fantasies of death by drowning may be inspired by a desire to return to the encompassing waters of the womb.
