Landscapes: A Journey Home in Textiles

This post is about a show that opens next week at Kudos Gallery in Paddington. It's a textiles show featuring the work of a number of COFA students and staff. Details are on the invitation below:


This is my explanation of my work and how it fits the theme of the show:

Embodied Landscapes

The works for this exhibition were all made from old socks. I imagine these socks as people wore them to go about their lives, walking across pavements and parks and suburban streets. They have taken on the energy from the lives they have been connected to; the lived experience has become embodied in these socks. Along the way they have encountered myriad landscapes, the stages upon which our lives are lived. And each time they returned home, they brought those landscapes with them.

With these works I’m not trying to represent a landscape, but merely show the physical products that have moved through various landscapes. With the work from the I Am Because We Are series, not only are the various people joined together by their shared humanity, but also by our shared environment; Not only are our lives shaped by our social experiences, but also by the world that sustains us. As we irrevocably change our landscape, so we change ourselves.

The first two works are both called Embodied Landscapes, and are new this year. Embodied Landscapes 1 is made from only white socks, but the range of shades gives it a feeling of geological strata, meshing with the landscape theme. I've included shots of it stretched out and rolled up. I like both effects.





This is Embodied Landscapes 2. I showed a slightly different configuration of it in this post, before I sewed the individual lengths together. I was inspired by African kente cloth, but it also reminds me of Sean Scully's paintings.


This floor piece was part of the I Am Because We Are installation, but I intended the greens and browns of the colour scheme to evoke a landscape when I made it, so thought it would fit this show, too.