“Safety Nets” 2017 - 2018
The material of fabric can contain a multitude of meanings: it is used in domestic spaces for aesthetic and utilitarian purposes, or for ceremonial purposes. It can suggest mystery, add illusions, and can conceal certain things. Similarly, to fabric’s semiotic ability, I am interested in creating work that plays with the slippages of time, space, and the boundary of meaning and belonging.
This body of work was informed by the concept of surface architecture (the interaction between the structure and the skin of a building) as a metaphor for looking at the relationship between the body and form, and comfort and safety in relation to ecological sadness. Using this as a point of departure for the work, I considered the boundary between individual spaces and shifts in the physical.
“Slippages”, takes the basic form of a quilt. This installation consists of squares of dyed fabric, plastic sheeting, and construction netting. “Slippages” refers to the history of abstraction and both utilitarian and handmade processes. It shifts between different references and narrative suggestions. “ A new memorial to past touches,” continues the idea of quilt-making and abstraction and skirts the border between sculpture and painting. While, “In the end, we saw the sky,” acts as a portal and alludes to the vastness of abstract thought, even while the fabric suggests intimacy and function.
This project was created with the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
UNKNOWNS
The same path is followed through repeated motions, over and over again. These wandering lines, break open, fall apart, are pulled down by gravity. To wander can be an idea of escape. Actions that disrupt any one the discernible endings with an open work of fiction.
Using tools of active imagination and reflective practice, I use material-thinking to research the connection between movement and the act of making. With dyeing and cutting large pieces of fabric, I think about how we both experience and observe the world. It is also the extra-aesthetic meanings embedded within the medium of fabric itself that I am drawn to – that of gender, memory, and ritual. The tension between the inherent collapse, and the optimistic expression of these large meandering monuments. In part, these pieces are also physical expressions of questions about sense-making and the metaphysical impulse – the desire to define and to understand, but also that which is just beyond knowing.
