An Exhibition Reflection

overlapped / frayed - 140cm x 160cm - gouache, acrylic, embroidery floss, shells, beads on raw canvas, textile

I had hoped to leave this piece after our exhibition and move on but I always find myself ruminating on things until I have cracked a code embedded within them. This made me a good mathematician.

When I look at it now I can feel my own fear. I cut this canvas square and I drew this dancing seaweed. As an attempt to support it with rocks, I added these blobs of paint. The nature of fabric and the nature of water prevailed and the edges began to seep and close in.

*Anouk and Esmé helping me to decide what to do about the edges*

This grappling with edges has been brought to my attention many times over the past few months by different people about different pieces of work. It is not something I had noticed about myself but now that I have seen it I can’t help but focus on it. One tutor advises me to work within the edges, another imagines me expanding them and covering the wall of the entire room. I envisioned transcending them in some way. I think that is what I tried to do when I placed the canvas piece on the sheer fabric. To extend the borders while also blurring them. The glittering veil becomes a halfway point between the painted fabric and the rest of the world.

*Photo taken of the sky above a construction site*

I took this photo of the sky above a construction site and have found myself returning to it in my camera roll over the last few weeks. It wasn’t until the exhibition was over, my artwork was off the wall and hidden away in a locker somewhere and I looked at the image again, that I realised that my subconscious mind was recreating aspects of the composition in the draped fabrics. Unbeknownst to myself, I had poured so much of this period of my life into this piece that I had previously felt was not communicating my ideas very well. A familiar version of myself suspended between the big sky and the big city. A small vignette from home washed up by the waves onto the sand for collection.

*detail - gouache, acrylic, embroidery floss, shells, beads on raw canvas*

I’m now ambivalent towards this piece. I’m both comforted and confronted by the parts of my psyche held within it. In the critique, two of my friends, while describing the painted square, started mimicking the imagined movement of the seaweed. If this artwork achieved nothing else, I would be satisfied that it made people dance.