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