• Exhibitions
• 2007
• Exhibition: Innovators 4
• PLAY Narinda Cook
• BECOS WE'RE WORF IT! Motel Sisters
• TEXTile Mandy Gunn
• REPETITION 2 Nicole Byrne

INNOVATORS 4 EXHIBITIONS

16 November - 16 December 2007

Mandy GUNN
TEXTile
2007
two hand woven bibles and two lengths of fabric woven on a Jacquard Loom; printed material on cardboard construction

Textile related structures and remnants of text, often in the form of recycled paper rubbish, have been central to my art practice for many years, reflecting my interest in the historical and contemporary anthropological nature of textiles.
In Selvedge magazine I found an article relevant to this work:

"The cultural context of both text and textile is complex, ancient and widespread--material remains, together with written word and oral traditions of language, enable the tracing of cultural associations for textile traditions through time and space, some of which might otherwise disappear. In the shifting of evidence, through which the past is unearthed and bought into the scrutiny of the present, that which is written down can be matched against the material remains. Every textile word it seems, traces a map and a time line through peoples and places beyond the present.
We recognise that the relationship between text and textile is extraordinarily rich, complex and profound. The intricacy of the interface between material and conceptual fields as in the meeting of text and textile--is a site of ingenious and playful interchange in which textiles secrete messages through patterns and structures, are translated through metaphor and allegory or are pictures as a text-field of threads, arrayed in serried fields across a sheet of paper." [Victoria Mitchel].

To explore these links between text and textile I decided to use what is most generally considered to be the most influential text of the Western world, the Bible. In keeping with my practice of using recycled materials I obtained two Bibles from an op shop, set up a hand loom and began the long and ritual process of cutting pages into strips, reading snippets and hand weaving these small sections as weft across the warp. Although the process compresses the words and makes them only partially visible, it actually makes the book into a larger item than it was. At intervals I have woven in the cotton symbols of the Star of David for the Old Testament and the Cross in the New.

In contrast to such a slow and traditional weaving method [the work was woven over six months], I have used a macro lens to photograph and enlarge sections of the text of both Old and New Testaments. These images have then been scanned into a computer programme on an industrial Jacquard Loom which weaves cloth incorporating a repeat system both widthwise and lengthwise.

The printed material on cardboard references both Hebrew and English versions of the Bible; these have been collaged, cut and reconstructed using various woven structures to create 3dimensional pieces.

TEXTile therefore weaves together text, textile structures, the traditional, technological and anthropological.

Installation Photos