Exhibition
A Very Long Engagement
Sherri Smith, North Polar Region, 2005
Opening Reception
Thursday 17 January at 8 pm
The six artists in this exhibition investigate the subject of time, both literally and symbolically, through the use of their chosen textile materials and processes, and in the concepts that they explore. Beginning with the idea of a continuous filament or thread or thought, all have taken very different trajectories, using media that demand high levels of skill and experience, and long years of practice. Most of the artists have been working for many decades in their fields, exercising the consummate skill of those who know their media inside out, improvising seamlessly while maintaining a conceptual rigour. In all of their practices, the subject matter is also informed by the material and process choices exercised along the way.
Jozef Bajus was trained in traditional textile practices in his native Slovakia. Over decades of work he has moved away from loom-based production to an assemblage process that involves an accumulation of small units, built upon one another - a spinning together of disparate materials and digital imagery.
Pat Hickman uses long tubes of translucent gut as both armature and carrier of meaning to probe loss and emptiness while reminding us of our own mortality. The filament of membrane is essential in life, extending on into an afterlife both comforting and troubling.
Printmaker Doug Guildford's grandmother crocheted, and some time ago he began to crochet as a way of understanding structure and as a way to connect creative exploration with personal history. The crocheted form grows incrementally, changing over the course of years, recording moment upon moment of activity, experience and thought.
As the youngest artist in the exhibition, Dorie Millerson's engagement is not as long as the other artists'. She works with the archaic yet intimate language of needle lace to explore distances in time or place; the forms are tiny and subtle, slow in the making, eloquent in their delicacy.
Sherri Smith weaves narrow strips and assembles them into portraits of planetary forms generously provided by NASA astronomers - an ancient discipline harnessed to illustrate digital information too new for full comprehension.
Martha Stanley deconstructed Anasazi sandal soles (artifacts from ancestral Pueblo culture in the South Western United States) to discover how they were made, and has re-invented a thousand-year-old knotting system that she uses to make modern rugs.
For all of the artists in the exhibition, the notion of a very long engagement has taken a different form, yet their works interlink and overlap, each the result of single-minded production over years of exploration. A high degree of expertise, discipline and commitment to material - mostly fibrous - unites the practice of each, yet the disparate directions each pursues is evidence of the versatile and fundamental character of a thread.
