Strangers

20.01.23 - 04.03.23
Matteo Cantarella Gallery

text
checklist
press: kubaparis

About the work:

Breath is a visceral part of the works. Wind, sun, and water makes up the process behind the works that is created using one of the world’s oldest photographic techniques - the Cyanotype. By placing objects on silk, the sun creates a white imprint which, when washed in water, becomes blue. The process became famous in the 1800’s when Anna Atkins made the first photographs of plants for an encyclopaedia of seaweed. In these three textile works, belonging to the series Strangers, the sun is replaced with the moon and the work is printed at night during changing seasons. Women Walking / Women Marching (Night Walkers) (2022-2023) is a grief work, made as a response to the constant news of women being attacked and killed walking home at night. Numerous pieces of silk are sewn together in a patchwork of silk, bedsheets, and table cloth with imprints of high heeled shoes and  human hair. In the absence of the female body, a haunting, ghostly story unfold. Breath is felt through the varying layers of blue tones as the shoes are walking, falling, circling, meeting, running across the blue. What began as a need to imprint the ghosts of femicide; Kim Wall, Sarah Everard, Emilie Meng (and many many more) develops into spirits marching and breathing through the night in unity and in the absence of their bodies their being is reclaimed. Ultimately re-joined in a symbiotic rhythm, the body becomes one with the natural world – and here, undulating water, drifting clouds and wandering creatures appear to emerge from the depths of the blue-toned silk, attempting to make space for the viewer to feel that the mysogonist violence against women and girls has its place in a larger context of violence against our planet. Breath is equally felt through the textile work, the Fog, two pieces of silk printed over two separate winter nights and stitched together in a cutline. Imprints of hair curls printed in moon light in one long single exposure blurs the traces of the subject. Concealing the figurative into abstraction creates an ephemeral impression of stormy weather referencing images of sea by old French Master Painters. Hair curl imprints are repeated in Shore, the third cyanotype, created during a winter morning through the night in heavy rain. In this work the hair appears clearly on a cold blue sky above icebergs’. The viewer is placed on shore looking out on the icy waters and hair curls falling as snow flakes from above. The series of work contain a duality, where the most intimate parts of the body, such as human hair are inserted into vast landscapes of sky, sea and melting icebergs. This duality allows the viewer to feel themselves, their grief, anger and hope in and for the planet's climate change. In Strangers breath is ghostly, spiritual and in one with the natural world as a death rally from a reclining world.

The Fog, 2023
cyanotype on heavy weight silk, 16 hours overnight exposure (in two parts), cut line 102.0 x 148.0 cm




Installation view: The North Pole and Shore






Shore, 2023
cyanotype on chiffon silk, 20 hours overnight exposure 122.0 x 141.5 cm






The North Pole, 2022
cyanotype on chiffon silk, 15 minutes artificial exposure 127.0 x 141.5 cm