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.