Output details

Transformations. Transformations was part of the celebrations marking Smiths Row 40th anniversary. The group exhibition (including myself, Catherine Bertola, Susan Collis, Ben Coode-Adams, Roger Hiorns, Haroon Mizra, Freddie Robins, Caroline Wright) showcased the work of what the gallery described as ‘a number of leading UK artists that it has supported throughout its history... This enables them to step onto the first rung of the ladder in their career and they often go on to exhibit at higher profile national venues and international galleries that do not have the remit or capacity to work with artists during these early stages...These particular individuals have also been selected because their work explores seeming contradictions to transform objects or meanings’. The rationale for Transformations was doubly significant as the invitation to be part of the exhibition marked a significant transformation in my practice and the first opportunity to speculatively test new strategies of making arising out of my research.

Invitation to be part of Transformations provided the first opportunity to speculatively test new strategies of making arising out of research entitled ‘Pragmatics of attachment and detachment: the productive indeterminacy of textile’. This research explores the agency of textile from three perspectives: the diverse contexts from which textile derives its contradictory meanings; the subjective and objective dimensions of the experiential encounter; and the constitution of my own subjectivity as it is materialised and mobilised in relation to the textile and fine art communities in which I operate.

The new methodological approach involves the creation of individual elements that can be variously configured… and reconfigured. The intention is to maintain a sense of mutability where meaning is not stable but continually in flux, produced through temporary connections and coalitions emerging from a series of provisionally staged tableau.

The aim is to draw on the cultural and psychological potency of textile and establish an affirmative subjective attachment. However, at the same time, the hope is to also underscore the precarious nature of modern subjectivity by resisting conceptual synthesis and maintaining the material otherness of the work. A reductive and formal vocabulary both provides a level of ambiguity where meaning is suggested yet unable to settle and allows for a dynamic tension between aesthetic affect and wider social contexts. Arguably, it is this staged artifice and ‘complicit’ formalism that is particularly important for textile in terms of its ability to assimilate with, and differentiate from, its mass material counterparts.

One of the elements used within the Smiths Row tableau was also exhibited as part of 'BITE-SIZE', an exhibition and accompanying catalogue of miniature textiles celebrating 15 years of collaboration between textile artists in the UK and Japan exhibited at The Daiwa Foundation in London and at two venues in Japan.