Review for Art South Africa of Strijdom van der Merwe's exhibition at Circa on Jellicoe, Everard Read Gallery

See my review for Art South Africa - Strijdom van der Merwe's exhibition at Circa on Jellicoe, Everard Read Gallery Johannesburg:

http://johannesburg.academia.edu/AnnMarieTully/Papers/1668793/Review_of_Strijdom_van_der_Merwe_at_Circa_on_Jellicoe

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie...

Ann-Marie Tully, Let sleeping dogs lie - Maximilion, 2012.

Gesso and oil on 100% Cotton Fabriano. 

Ann-Marie Tully, Let sleeping dogs lie - Flying Poppit, 

2013. Gesso and oil on 100% Cotton Fabriano. 

Ann-Marie Tully, Let sleeping dogs lie - Flying Poppit, 

2013 (detail). Gesso and oil on 100% Cotton Fabriano. 

Let sleeping dogs lie (series)

The idea for the Let sleeping dogs lie series stems from a current body of work that investigates the temporality of animal life in relation to human/animal relationships and loss. The agency of animal beings is asserted in these works that concentrate on the particularity of individual creatures, and human perspectives. The titles of these works ironically reference well known colloquial expressions that involve the metaphoric and metonymic subsumption of animal characteristics in communicating human experience and emotion. Although these anthropocentric colloquialisms often prove to be apt communications, such expressions tend to reduce the particularity of animal beings in a colonising humanist gesture.

Excerpt from my opening address at the Fibreworks VII Contexturise Exhibition

 

A Passage from my opening address at the Fibreworks exhibition, Contexturise at the Faculty of Art and Design Gallery - 16 May 2012:

Let me speak here only of impressions, trend, mark and meaning.

Submerged kimonos and an Ukeo-E geisha embroidery.

A kimono become designer labels −

A work that seamlessly joins in terms unresolved,

The implacable relationship of the material East to the West.

Postages, love letters, and some travel implied.

Harbingers of the indexical time of making. As if

A shared past belonging to both maker and viewer;

But invariably unique.

Engorged and engorging textured fabrics,

Knitted, crocheted, embroidered, quilted, felted – felt.

A textile carnival and lent – flesh and bone,

Guts and entrails. Cones and squares,

Small, smaller, smallest, the chirosophy of hand and machine.

These cyborg hatchlings.

The ‘carte de tendre’ revisited here –

Rivers of thread and cartographic appliqué, still reliquary forms Hanging mantles of metaphor, mark and meaning.

Further, deconstructed dress. Cut apart

And patterned on the present – yellow numbers seem important

Somehow.

Silken thread, cocoons and insect life

Seen and ripped from the invisible

Economy of farming and production.

Animal presence in medium and made of medium,

Cloaking the human, wearing the body

Removed.

See the full speech at:

http://johannesburg.academia.edu/AnnMarieTully/Papers/1631209/Fibreworks_VII_Contexturize_Exhibition_An_Opening_Address

The Bangwelu Swamp Book - a life drawing exercise.

Ann-Marie Tully, Bangwelu Swamp Book (2012).
Found colonial map, indian ink and cotton thread.



Variations on Cats and Dogs - Recent Paintings

Ann-Marie Tully, Curl Up and Die - Tabatha, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3.

Ann-Marie Tully, Let Sleeping Dogs Lie - George, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3.



Ann-Marie Tully, Let sleeping Dogs Lie - Jessica, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3.



Ann-Marie Tully, Let sleeping Dogs Lie - Frieda, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3.

Ann-Marie Tully, Let sleeping Dogs Lie - Tessa, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3.

Ann-Marie Tully, Curl Up and Die - Peter, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3.

Ann-Marie Tully, Curl Up and Die - Joe, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3.

Ann-Marie Tully, Curl Up and Die - Smilla, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3.

Ann-Marie Tully, Let Sleeping Dogs Lie - George, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3. Detail.

Ann-Marie Tully, Let Sleeping Dogs Lie - Jessica, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3. Detail.



Ann-Marie Tully, Curl Up and Die - Tabatha, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3. Detail.



Ann-Marie Tully, Curl Up and Die - Smilla, 2012.
Oil on paper, A3. Detail.



New Article published in Image and Text 2012

Check out my article, 'Becoming Animal: Liminal Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary South African Art' in a special edition of Image and Text (University of Pretoria in collaboration with the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at UJ's Faculty of Art Design and Architecture). The edition is entitled: Space Ritual Absence: the Liminal in Contemporary South African Art.

 

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13493482/I%26T%2017_final.pdf

Structure, Sign and Play - New 'stitching' works.



Ann-Marie Tully, Deconstructed Pastoral Scene I. Felt, calico,
recovered upholstery and textile print, black cotton thread,
  40cm (H) x 55cm (W).

Ann-Marie Tully, Deconstructed Pastoral Scene I. Felt, calico,
recovered upholstery and textile print, black cotton thread,
  40cm (H) x 55cm (W). Detail.

Ann-Marie Tully, Deconstructed Pastoral Scene I. Felt, calico,
recovered upholstery and textile print, black cotton thread,
  40cm (H) x 55cm (W). Detail.

Ann-Marie Tully, Deconstructed Pastoral Scene I. Felt, calico,
recovered upholstery and textile print, black cotton thread,
  40cm (H) x 55cm (W). In Progress.



Ann-Marie Tully, Deconstructed Pastoral Scene I. Felt, calico,
recovered upholstery and textile print, black cotton thread,
40cm (H) x 55cm (W). In Progress.

These appliqued pieces relate to a 'fetish' I have about the 'ghosts' that occupy discarded materials. The upholstery pattern in this design is a fabric off cut that I have been hanging onto for years. the muted greens and loping pattern belongs in my mind to a bygone Edwardian and Victorian sensibility; harbouring a romantic sensibility - not our own. A few years ago, I attended an interdisciplinary conference at Cumbria University about 'living in landscape'. As one can imagine a lot of the local presentations concentrated on the English pastoral environment, feted by Wordsworth, Ruskin and other artists of the Victorian age for its 'pristine' and 'un-touched' natural beauty. It was a real surprise to find out that the characteristic stark hilly vistas, and the sweeping grassland structure of the English countryside is a result of large scale and sustained human intervention in this environment: de-forestation, industrialisation and agriculture - it can be said that the little sheep (put there by humans for social, fiscal and utilitarian capital), have transformed the landscape.

With this in mind I considered this pastoral scene as an ironic and appropriate setting for the 'reinvention' of this Victorian-style fabric (so aligned with the textile mills and industrial sensibility that occupied the North of England). In the manner of Derrida's playful aporeas, where internal elements in a text are shown to be in conflict by his deconstructive 'piercings'; this 'pierced visual text' (which in its patched 'bad sewing' form, can be said to have a deconstructive aesthetic), combines the idealised pastoral environment with the products of an industrial nemesis.