Tristan Chant, The Refreshness, 2023. Jacquard woven tapestry, 162 x 123cm. Courtesy: the artist and Jennings Kerr, Robertson.
Jennings Kerr presents a group exhibition featuring works by artists Boni Cairncross, Tristan Chant, Hannah Cooper and Harriet Goodall.
“Our lives are complex, increasingly fast paced in the contemporary world. There is always something to rush off to, always late to the event or leaving early to get ahead. This show tells a story of these shifts in pace, an unravelling of how we harmonise with material, how we wrap ourselves up in it, apply our hands to it, images on and in it, as well as how threads can be descriptive of us.
We were weaving in the Neolithic era, often for utility and the history of cloth and woven fibre is one to look to when thinking about our fraying into a throw away culture. Gone are the days of darning, or maybe a return to quality and refinement. The celebration of wear and tear, the ageing gracefully and awe found in exposed threads, like the honesty of an ancient textile. Sure, time and labor are somewhat relevant here, however I would say that it is something deeper, an ingrained relationship to fibre and cloth. We live on and in it, wicking sweat or insulating the body, repelling water or reflecting light, expressing who we are and what it means to be individual. How do we relate to it in order to suggest something of ourselves?
These works come together from very different practices, disparate approaches to the soft but undeniably interlaced through a shared appreciation of craft and skill, technologies (both contemporary and ancient) as well as the relationship between many of these techniques and the prevalence of them in contemporary painting. There is a topographic, a geography and somewhat accidentally there is the land threaded between all of this work. Lands infused into the threads and other materials, lifted from the land and woven in order to echo it. A slowing down to understand, an absorption of our places.” – James Kerr, exhibition essay, 2023.
Opening Exhibition: Saturday 18 November, 2 – 4pm.
