works sales info about

Ex Novo2014

details

[Quadruple-weave linen, plastic and foam-core structures, ink on
grid paper]

"[T]he inherent opposition within all modern art: those who search into the very bowels of reality in order to know and assimilate its values and wretchedness; and those who desire to go beyond reality, who want to construct ex novo new realities, new values, and new public symbols."
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, 1976.

This series responds to the Modernist architectural concept of Ex Novo: the demolition of existing places and historical ideals in favour of new, "improved", Utopian design. Tubes and planes twist and expand from their flat, folded state on the loom into presence and dimensionality. They emerge from a space of craft, disorder, and physicality, into a transcendental space of Modernist Utopian design. Through a system of ordered threads, the sculptures are constructed as seamless three-dimensional shapes. Each piece contains an element of textile and an element of architecture, humanizing the Modernist and modernizing the ritual of weaving. At once soft and rigid, loose and structured, they are surreal hybrids. This work exists in between the opposition described by Tafuri, to show that "new realities" cannot exclude the body, wretchedness and abjection.

Each piece is woven in quadruple-weave structures on an 8-shaft loom. Working four separate layers at once, a three-dimensional shape is constructed line by line, without any sewing. Lifting different configurations of the layers, and passing the wefts in different orders, offers a variety of forms from the same warp. The black-and-white grid designs evoke mathematics, technology and architecture, and also reference the basics of weaving. Accompanying blueprint drawings act as coded instructions, providing a glimpse into the sculptures’ conception and construction.

 

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