Textiles in the current climate

Interconnected

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interconnection

/ɪntəkəˈnɛkʃ(ə)n/

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noun

a mutual connection between two or more things.
"the complex interconnections between people's lives in
mutually joined or related
having internal connections between the parts or elements

Contextual Research

Arte povera

An art movement aiming to break down the ‘dichotomy between art and life’

This was done by making art, sculptures with ‘everyday materials’ → this could be applied to using recycled materials addressing ideas about climate

the work is characterized by startling juxtapositions of apparently unconnected objects

Alberto Burris work using a burlap sack within his abstract painting, early arte povera

challenge the boundaries of traditional artistic practice

forcing its viewers to look at previously inconsequential material and activities in a new light

the dissolution of the art/life boundary

materials like soil, food, water and cheap building materials

Post-war

Arte Povera artists strove to provoke a subjective and personal response to each of their pieces, stressing an interaction between viewer and object that was unrepeatable and purely original → this is a concept im interested in the conversation between viewer and artworks, is there value in the environment the art is placed in, what is the value of the materials used and how do each of these affect personal response to artworks?

Sculpture is most closely associated with Arte Povera.

Stemming from a rejection of abstract and minimalist painting styles - these had dominated the art market of the 1960s

artists created objects that required interaction from the audience or institution to function

Germano Celant - wrote theory and backed ideas of arte povera, become a voice for the movement

several artists opposed the use of the name "Arte Povera" in favour of "Visualized Art Processes"

Key Artists

Alighiero Boetti
Luciano Fabro
Jannis Kounellis
Giulio Paolini
Pino Pascali
Emilio Prini
Alberto Burri
Giovanni Anselmo
Piero Gilardi
Mario Merz
Gianni Piacentino
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Gilberto Zorio

Fluxs
- Fluxus sought to change the history of the world
- destroy any boundary between art and life
- to dismiss and mock the elitist world of "high art"
- find any way possible to bring art to the masses
- used humor to express their intent
- Fluxus art involved the viewer, relying on the element of chance to shape the ultimate outcome of the piece
- heavily influenced by the ideas of John Cage, who believed that one should embark on a piece without having a conception of the eventual end. It was the process of creating that was important, not the finished product. → my work is process led, resonates with me
- Was it an art movement, an anti-art movement, a sociopolitical movement or, as the artists themselves tended to protest, not a movement at all? -NY times article
- Key Artists
- George Maciunas
- Yoko Ono
- Robert Filliou
- Ben Vautier
- Nam June Paik
- La Monte Young
- George Brecht
- Alison Knowles
Cut Piece (1964-66)
Artist: Yoko Ono
Cut Piece puts the artist at the mercy of the audience: Ono invited the audience to cut away her clothing as she sat completely still and expressionless on stage. The interaction between artist and viewer is unequivocally intimate, as the viewer completely invades the personal space of the artist, literally cutting away the boundary between the self and the other. Control is literally in the hands of the audience member who holds the scissors, and the outcome of the piece changed each time it was performed.

Jannis Kounellis
- created works that juxtaposed disparate materials, including stone, cotton, coal, bed frames, and doors
- A prevalent theme in his practice was the incorporation of real life—simulated or otherwise—into spaces of art
- This phenomenon can be seen in works where he has installed live birds in cages alongside paintings, sculptures accompanied by the playing of a Bach score, and his recurring installations wherein 12 live horses are displayed in galleries or other art spaces → this could be how I incorporate an element of natural effects, make an art piece and document the effects of nature humans and weather on it.
Marisa Merz
- the artist’s works often blur the categorization of domestic objects—blankets, bowls of salt, and boots—with art objects, such as sculpted heads and painted angels. “There has never been any division between my life and my work,” the artist once said
- “There has never been any division between my life and my work,”
- Art povera - sole female artist
- the artist combined objects and situations from her daily life with sculpture, painting, and installation, producing a swing for her daughter, props for her husband’s performances, and hanging mobiles for the kitchen
Alberto-burri
- unconventional materials and experimental techniques that position the former army medic and prisoner of war as a central figure in post–World War II art
- blur the line between painting and sculpture
- his interest in materiality, the artist’s figurative work often investigates the use of non-traditional materials such as burlap, wood, tar, plastic, and zinc oxide
- appeals to a sense of play that perhaps is more common in children with their innocence about the prescribed meaning of things. In Burri’s hands plastic, burlap, and scraps of wood and metal vie with the most sublime subjects of art
Emilie Benes Brzezinski
- Her expressive themes always related to nature. Eventually, she shifted focus to creating monumental wood sculpture, using a chain saw and ax to carve towering forms that breathed new life into felled trunks.
- I particularly like the way she uses ‘the given’ tree trunks and creates stories through image making
Installation art as interconnection - connecting everyone through a shared experience also connecting through the medium of the art and the message
- Yona Friedman and Tomás Saraceno lay the first "building blocks"
Harmony Hammond
- Hammond created these works in the early 1970s when as a young artist she was active in the burgeoning feminist and gay and lesbian rights movements. She calls them “Presences” because, as she said, “they speak to the history and power of creative women, as well as feminist collectivity. They are about occupying space.”
- constructed them from scraps of cloth ripped from worn-out clothing, curtains, and bed linens donated by friends
- Choosing materials that related to women’s creative—frequently domestic—practices such as weaving, she intentionally challenged traditional distinctions between painting and sculpture, as well as art and craft
- “My work has a survivor aesthetic, which has to do with piecing things together and making something out of nothing. It’s about rupture, suture, and endurance.”
- In 1972 she was one of 20 artists—including Barbara Zucker, Nancy Spero, and Howardena Pindell—who founded A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s cooperative gallery in the United States
In one of the panels of the large mixed-media triptych Inappropriate Longings (1996), the words “GODDAMN DYKE” are incised in gold latex next to fragments of floral-patterned linoleum. A casket-size metal trough full of dead leaves sits in front of the painting, suggesting violence. Taken together, these elements insert a lesbian presence into regions of rural America and the modernist painting field.

“The idea of what is usually buried and hidden beneath the surface, but is now revealed through materials, speaks to the painting I’m doing now,” Hammond said of Inappropriate Longings.

Fausto Melotti
- Slowly music has ensnared me, disciplining me with its laws, distractions and digressions in a balanced discourse
- Coming of age in prewar Milan, and living through the horrors of the Second World War, Melotti metabolized wartime devastation in his work by returning to Renaissance principles of harmony, order, geometry, and musical structure, which he integrated into a highly personal yet universally accessible artistic language that expresses the full range of emotional experiences in modern human existence.
Eva Hesse
- pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics
- I like the delicacy of her work and the natural feel to it. The skin like textures and beautiful hanging pieces .
Allan Kaprow
- pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening"
- His happenings and interaction with viewers is something I want to take onboard with this project, something where interaction changes the nature of a piece.
Joseph Beuys

Materiability
I liked how Beuys was always in conversation with material, his fat projects received a visceral reaction people did not like this as a medium and i think that in itself is important, whether it was the texture of the fat, or the extreme excess a reflection of what was not had during the war, the extremes of excess and also the animal connection to meat consumption and ethics about eating meat. His use of materials is important. The rooms of felt create this somber effect, the way in which the piano and felt walls had a dialogue the way that if sound was played from the piano it would be contained muffled by the felt, it created this sense of entrapment and loneliness isolation.

Fraction
Fractured
Disintegrate

Neil Bottle

Fractured memories and images
Photographs, could I burn photographs of the process as another way of disintegrating or interaction
- Fractured
- dissolving ness
working with the given
- I am going to explore the idea of working with given materials and the translation of print onto such materials.
  
  Process
  Using recycled materials to practice ideas of arte povera.
  ‘Interconnected’ with wire
  
  Parallel Existence – Roger Catherineau
  1954
  Particularly taken with this image, the layered meaning and emotions of entrapment, of a sense of stopped time. These ideas coincieded with my own thoughts about lockdown and ideas of staying home and being ‘locked out’ of the normality of our lives. I liked the extreme exposed areas of image, and think an image like this would look very poignant applied as a print. I have tried to recreate the themes and style of this image through my own photography and editing.
  
  Edited versions of my photographs in response to Catherineau
  - Exploring how material could disrupt and distort print/ image. Using wire as ‘connection’
    
    Further exploration with digital editing
    
    Mock up of ideas of how to separate and break up spaces. The wire gives this a dark nature, reminiscent of war injuries and barbed wire?
    The acatet also loses the coloured areas of the photo and the marks left have become very abstract. I like the sutured effect of the wire in this way and experimenting with the length of the wire to further the distance between parts.
    
    Manual layering experimentations
    
    Stitch experimentation, this was a time consuming process and I don't really like the results the thread does not hold the pieces as well as the wire does. I much prefer the connotations of the wire and the properties of the wire.
    
    I am going to print onto this material. They are lightweight foam trampoline parts, they will work well as they will be light so easy to interconnect, they can be easily cut through, and they are already worn and marked with deep scratched and marking which i like, adding to this worn and marked look.
    
    Process, printing screens, images that resulted were very abstract, elements of the design were transferred, I really like the way the screens have come out, the marks and areas of light and dark are interesting. I like that it is hard to tell what the images are while still having some cohesion.
    The print process always leads me to further develop my ideas, with this printed piece I am going to layer the rectangles and reverse applique into the piece, following the idea of interconnection, connecting each image to the previous.
    
    Acutlistions of prints onto fabric, and foam board. The fabric ones are some of my favourites I experimented using a wet screen and liked the way the inks bled into the fabric more giving a ghost like effect, which I think emulates ideas of lost past times prior to lockdown restrictions. The foam board links to using salvaged materials (arte povera).
    
    Digital editing experimentation
    - Images for transfer to screens, re-printed to change the depth and explore layering.
      
      Working with the given and translating print to material.
      
      Prints onto foam board then worked into to create depth and mini environments. Connected by wire. I like the concrete look these pieces have, the industrial feeling in conjunction with the wire. They also link with ideas of Fluxes and Arte Povera in which the audience must interact with the artwork, by moving around these pieces different sections of the layers can be viewed with for or less of the background revealed.
      
      Patchwork process
      
      Skirt and top using fabric scraps, printed with design and patchworked together. This shows the process of my work and through experimenting with piece and interconnecting materials together.
      1. What areas of your working practices have developed and changed during the
      project…please provide examples.
      My working practice has changed during this project, I began with research letting that dictate the process of my work whereas I typically follow an idea finding artists and research that compliments my idea. By using research in a more direct way I think this project is more conceptualised. I have had to consider the materials I have used and respond to Arte Povera through working with the given, also considering final outcomes. I also developed my online art skills using photoshop to edit images and consider placement for print which is a practice I think I will continue with.
      
      2. What did you hope to achieve but didn’t and why?
      I was hoping to create a large defined print onto the foam board and ‘piece’ the image back together but I did not achieve this and the project looks more at materials than the context of print. I found it difficult to work with larger pieces at home and the print I designed is tonal and not defined enough to be printed large scale.
      
      3. If you were to continue, where would this take you next?
      If I was to continue this project I would begin printing onto other surfaces I'm interested in how the print would look onto wood, and then maybe returning the elements of the material back into environment, ie printing onto tree stumps then returning these to a forest environment and looking at the connection with art in natural environment and a cyclical process.
      
      4. What comments from staff or peers promoted re-thinking and change?
      Calypso suggested printing onto a material and then re making the image like a puzzle I liked this idea and took it in a way of breaking down material and re making the print but in an alternate way, seen through the foam structures.
      Gaby suggested looking into the Fluxus movement ‘It was the process of creating that was important, not the finished product’ this idea dictated the exploration stages of this project and I think is why I have no stand alone finished product more a range of pieces that explore the ideas of this project.
      
      5. What are the weakest aspects of the way you have worked?
      I think the timeline if this project is weak, I think that I should have focused on creating a specific outcome rather than several weaker ones. I feel like the oder in which I made pieces also is weak and that if I had printed onto more materials It would have helped develop the clothing I've made and the foam blocks.
      
      6. What are the strongest aspects of the way you have worked?
      I think the whole project is cohesive and the digital designs to actualised work is successful. The online exploration is a strong way of working as it allowed me to consider alternate colours and placements, and think specifically about how my design would look.
      
      7. What critical and contextual sources have most informed the methodology and
      outcome(s)?
      The movement of Arte Povera and the way artists strove to provoke an interaction between viewer and object, this has informed me in the way the foam structures change when interacted with, viewers can move around the pieces and different parts if the structure is revealed. Also I think by creating clothing there is a direct connection between weather and art as well as audience.
      
      8. What level of self-discovery has taken place during this period of time?
      I have discovered that working from home is not something I find easy, I am very much motivated by the energy of others and creative discussion. I have discovered that despite this I can work well, and some of my work can be done through an online process. I have also discovered that my work is equally effective without vibrant colours than with and exploring a muted colour palette and darker images.