In Cold Water, Her Curls Became Liquid

HAND EMBROIDERED TAPESTRY

Selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022
Spider Lashes and Velveteen Gasp are on view at Humber Street Gallery 23 September – 27 November 2022.

Selected by James Richards, Veronica Ryan and Zadie Xa. Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022 opens across the Humber Street Gallery and Ferens Art Gallery locations in Hull from 23 September to 27 November 2022. The touring exhibition continues at South London Gallery from 9 December 2022 to 19 March 2023.

The work draws upon the idea of the ‘bottle’ or container as hero, as detailed in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K Le Guin. In the essay, Le Guin presents a theory of human evolution drawn from Elizabeth Fisher’s cult feminist text Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society that the first human tool was not a weapon but a receptacle, something that made it possible to collect more than could be held in the hands. Taking the form of a teardrop, the works foreground the experience of the body as vessel through collected fragments; hands, hair, the mouth, and the eye. Drawn from a passage in book five of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, considering the relationship between fluidity and transformation. Between folds of satin, static curls becomes tender, dissolving into ribbons; ‘fading away, they vanished into slim streams’.

Work Details:
In Cold Water, Her Curls Became Liquid
2021
58x68x4cm framed
Silk hand-embroidery and freshwater pearl on woven jacquard in walnut