figure and ground

Working across textiles and drawing, ‘Figure and Ground’ channels the currencies of gentleness and intimacy to provoke the polemic situations of withdrawn proximities we inhabit. The works, defiantly quiet in a world of powers, compress the scales between immensity and the micro. They draw on the experience of human touch to evoke the phenomenon of surface that it both elucidates and fictionalises. The exhibition casts the audience between a virus-like, orgiastic mass loafing event and a civic safety apparatus that becomes the atmospheric barrier that sustains our life, the sky. The works challenge the image of the body as a container as something that is rather interconnected and fluid, begging us to imagine a continuous surface made from the language and legacies of intimacy. Touch here reads as an allegory for the broader potential of an embrace that is politically implicated within social organisation. The exhibition presents interconnected touch in a world that is at once corrupted by us into persistent barriers and our only hope.

Using Second-hand bedsheets as the primary material for the textile works, they come into being pre-loaded with intimate histories. Whilst at times referencing abstraction and colour field painting, the work thrives on an excess of encounter and the experiential perceptions of memories implanted in their materiality. The sculptures are soft and without armature, they tease the rendering of their external forms with an interiority, as what lies there is either just a zip away or directly brough to the surface. In all the works, it is at the join where the threshold of potential lies. The quotidian here is not banal, it’s the matter and meat of life. Between the poles of their display, the works draw in a compression of figure and ground, a wanting that there is no space between things, because perhaps no single one thing has an end within a continuous surface.