alysn midgelow-marsden WORKING ON NOW
TEXTILE ELEMENTS (Working title)
Mandi Lynn, Steve Balaam and I are working on a joint film and exhibition project which explores the relationship with my textiles to the elements. There are dresses, dancing, photographs, sound and more. Steve made a fabulous short (6 1/2 minutes) film about me which you can see below.
FABRICATED NARRATIVES
This exhibition will go live in October 2018. I am working with three other artists, Di Halstead, Helene Carpenter and Marianda Twydell.
It is an exhibition informed by the discards, stains and damages of life given new meaning and interpretation.
We each construct stories to make sense of situations or to push a point of view whether this is about the past, present or future. These tend to reinforce our personal views of our history, what our lives are like, decisions we make, and what we will or won’t achieve in our lives.
The artists participating in this exhibition have been selected for their previous connection to this theme in their chosen media. Their challenge is to create works which examine their own ‘fabricated narratives’ or simply fabricate stories for the objects and stains of objects. Whether historically accurate or playfully inventive, each work in the exhibition is part of a fabricated story. There is much new science which helps us to understand both the psychology and the philosophy of how and why we construct narratives to help us through life which the artists will be asked to investigate as a part of this exhibition.
Thus artists in this exhibition have varied backgrounds – textiles, paint, design, photography, sculpture and book art amongst others and these skills will be not only used to create the artists individual ‘fabricated narratives’ but to collaborate with the artists using other media to create ‘fabricated narratives’ in shared ways.
I will be approaching this through the long standing traditions of reusing and repurposing materials through darning, slips, boro, kantha, pojaki and other patchwork and stitch techniques used all over the world to conserve precious materials and to repurpose them.
It is my long held curatorial stance that combining textiles with other art mediums has to be the future of textiles as an expressive medium in the wider world of art. The works will not be simply justified by technical expertise, high levels of craft skills etc., but to display the meaning and intent of the piece or the maker.