Fractured Narratives
2018
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Fractured Narratives is a body of work made for the collaborative exhibition ‘Something to Remember’ with Alexis Neal. The exhibition referenced Louise Bourgeois’s late artist books ‘Nothing to Remember’ and ‘Ode to Forgetfulness’, in which she refigures forms and memories. Through iterative processes, working with textiles, stitching, knotting, drawing, printmaking, and text, my series explores the overlapping themes of aging, voice and refiguring. In this context refiguring is the act of remembering as a way of choosing what to leave behind.
At first glance my screenprints appear as objects of desire, but on closer inspection they are layered and fragmented. Vibrant colours, saccharine palettes and cropped scans of straps, ribbons, and mesh are fractured by marks from drawings of aging skin. Silver foil text works point towards a reading of subtext as a way to attend to what's not said. ‘Window’ (inspired by Ann Peebles’ 1973 song, ‘I can’t stand the rain’) narrates a form that is both inside and outside, a voiceless observer of all. Perhaps the most elusive works in the series are the blind embossments. Made through processes of inversion and removal, they suggest the possibility of breaking the hold of stories that insidiously undermine.
These works are echoed in an artist book printed on translucent silk through which layers accumulate, form into images, and dissolve as pages are turned. The book is presented in a space outlined by a macrame rope delineating a fragmented structure based on a child’s drawing of a house.
The exhibition 'Something to Remember' was shown at Gus Fisher Gallery (2018) and The Suter Gallery (2019).
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