Gallery 2 | Fabrication: A Message Folded Moulded and Stitched

Fabrication
A Message Folded Moulded and Stitched

Katja Abbott, Cathy Abraham, Willemien de Villiers, Laurel Holmes, Maia Lehr-Sacks, Kristen McClarty, Lindsay Quirk, Jo Roets.

Fabrication: A Message Folded, Moulded and Stitched, brings together eight artists working in various media, borne out of a rich history of craft, but that have now moved to a place of acceptance as contemporary art.

This exhibition focusses on the exciting interplay between an idea and a tactile response of forming that idea with the hands, using a process that is associated with craft, but elevating the making to contemporary art. “She makes things with her hands. It’s as if her synapses were connected directly to her fingers,” as Maria Buszek so aptly articulated in her collection of academic essays Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Thoughts transferred to a piece of art.

Each of the exhibiting artists has skills learnt, often from mothers or other women, or through their own needs and practices. Skills that were intended to be utilised to make things to use and mend and keep their hands busy. But instead, they are making things that have been “transformed into autonomous artistic creations and seen as detached from traditional contexts” (Karin E. Peterson “How the Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary” – in Buszek’s book referred to above).

The idea of the exhibition was to bring these objects together in a place, so that the thread or connection between the art pieces and the original skills is accepted and apparent; an exposé of contemporary art founded on traditional skills.

What is present in each piece is an idea, or train of thoughts. A message that has travelled from the artist’s brain, through their neural passages, their synapses, to the nerves that control their hands and what they do. So that each piece becomes their message, a concept intertwined with the fabrication of the piece.

The meaning or message of the piece need not be fixed by the artist; the exhibition viewer encounters the piece – they examine and read the title or the statement, and find relevance, based on their own lived experience.

Each artist weaves their own story through their fabricated pieces of contemporary art.