Place after Pattern after Place
glór invited me and textile artist Laura Vaughan, to respond to the use of patterns and repetition in fabric designs, and how it can connect us to places.
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For this work, I've selected unique fabrics acquired around the world that tell of identities and the histories of the communities they come from.
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Laura and I came together to tell stories of nature and culture. The patterned fabrics allow us to reflect on and better understand the places they originate from.
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Laura Vaughan is a Clare-based designer and artist who creates her own digital prints based on landscape scenes from the Irish West. She uses her designs to create household objects that bring rural Ireland into the home.
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For this
This performance creates the dual vantage points of both looking upon, and being looked upon. Visual metaphors of concave and convex lenses to illustrate two ambivalent world views, likening the experience, for people in new environments, of what it is like to be perceived. Somewhere in-between, both literally and figuratively, is the term ‘Reconvex’; popularised by Bahian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso (Reconvexo), which describes a person who can think about subjectivity relationally and feed on other cultures, whilst being at the same time conscious and proud of one’s ancestry and tradition.
For the installation in the gallery, I wanted to create and enact protection rituals made with circles of protection, as a shield from harmful forces or as a meditative act to create a particular state of mind. The circles were composed of elements that brought a statement of physical and spiritual protection. Sea salt, plants and its roots, books, family and friend photos, and a snake, a sacred animal that is part of my Yoruba spirituality belief.
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The printed textile I worked on in the installation is called Darling, Don’t Turn Your Back On Me – a popular and traditional Ankara fabric, and it reflected the reconvex shape that would contain in itself both concave and convex forms, as well a great analogy to name the piece.
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