Care as animating creative connections to lineage II

Continuing on my recent process of collaging textiles evolved into an exploration of an aesthetics of care encompassing both my lineage of textile-based practices and textiles in circulation. While aiming to honour familially and culturally undervalued women’s acts of reproductive labour embedded in personal textile objects, I symultaneously sought to elevate offcuts as mementos of the underappreciated and underpaid labour associated with textile industry.

Working in this way, I aimed to enable a context for the sentimental inherited textile objects and the found and gifted discarded ones to coexist in. In this context, the slower textile making represents a form of resistance to the dictates of neoliberal economy. I also find this process to be corresponding to my need to mend intergenerational emotional perforations due to temporality and experiences of migration.

I have recently attempted a large-scale composition in which to incorporate the scarf that has a sentimental value associated with my maternal grandmother. A self-taught seamstress, she used to live in a village and would often come visit our family in the city. On one occasion, she brought us some of her homemade preserves and one of the jars was wrapped in this scarf. Feeling very drawn to the scarf's colours and the pattern, I discovered it had a tag which said it was 100% made of wool in Czechoslovakia. Having learned that it was produced in a country that no longer exists and also that it felt quite warm around the neck, I decided to keep it. Washing and wearing it felt like rescuing a remnant of labour whose value has been shifting due to historical geopolitical changes.

The rest of the composition was created by layering remnants an offcuts that convey a sense of my grandmother's aesthetics as well as her sewing practice. I stitched the layers together using repetitive cross-stitch before experimenting with suspending the installation. I have also included some shadow (herringbone) stitches in one section on the remnant sheer polyester fabric. I experienced the composition as quite painterly, both during the process of layering and once it was suspended from the ceiling.

Sweet and Solemn WIP

I have also revisited the earlier experiment that followed the same process to contextualise a scarf and a shirt associated with my paternal grandmother, where all the involved elements are chosen based on their colour and materiality. This composition evolved to include collected and gifted offcuts and it references my memory of my grandmother's sense of aesthetics.

I Always See You in Blue WIP

Domesticity

I was very interested in layering of the opaque and sheer fabrics and have attempted suspending the work near windows to convey a sense of domesticity by referencing curtains that seemed like a very important element of a home to both of my grandmothers. I also wanted to create a sense of an environment where the viewer is able to walk around and in between the suspended works.

The recent HDR Art Lab group exhibition (AD Space, UNSW) seemed like an opportunity to attempt this as the rationale behind the exhibition was to show the work in progress that felt the most experimental.

This installation enabled me to observe the works in different times of the day and to document how light interacted with different transparencies of the layers.