Comfort/Discomfort
A new installation work about comfort and safety. This work will be presented as part of the Chivalry exhibition at the Williamson Art Gallery.
"This installation and sculpture is an introspective look at safety, comfort and discomfort. In this work I am exploring that through the materials used, the environment created, my own creative processes, passed down skills and learning from family members and personal experiences".
In my short description about the work I’ve referenced a number of things that I have used as a tool to explore comfort and safety.
I began exploring these themes through materials. So creating a dialogue between textiles and metal. These are materials that I have found prominent in my own life, my dad’s a welder and fabricator by trade and my mum and grandparents often handmade things around my home growing up.
During the past 18 months I have either self taught or I have asked my parents or my partner to teach me a number of their skills to make the work myself. This has involved learning to weld, to machine sew, and basic quilting patterns amongst other things. For me to then hand make each aspect of the work.
The built environment I then have made as a way to create a dialogue between some of the materials related to those skills: metal and mixed textiles.
These are materials used in gates or blankets and these can offer safety and comfort in quite contrasting ways. The language of gates and railing provide a barrier or protective layer within architecture. Quilts and blankets then offer comfort and safety in a warming, soft and nurturing way.
Looking at how these protective materials interact with each other. I have presented a permeable installation creating a space that shifts between comfort and discomfort through soft and hard materials.
I invite visitors to enter the space and reflect on their own foundations of safety and comfort. What is taken as a given and what could change this for them.
In the context of chivarly and green knight I want to ask the viewer to consider safety and comfort within the story and in chivalric code. What safety does Arthurian society offer, does legend offer, or oral tradition? To focus on the characters, how does Gawain consider what gives him safety, what does the green knights task offer and what does the landscape, the materials described in the text, the language of heraldry all offer in safety? How does our accepted and known world and values create safety and how can events change them.
More about Into the Wyld:
Material Matters presents Into the Wyld: a festival of contemporary art exploring the continuing legacy of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its unique connection to the Wirral.
Into The Wyld will feature a residency by the Material Matters Collective, and work from over 20 invited artists across the region. There is also an associated programme of performance art, poetry readings, children’s workshops, film screenings and a symposium.
Material Matters’ artists will respond to key themes in the Gawain poem across three exhibitions:
- Nature curated by Patric Rogers from 2nd August – 13th September
- Chivalry curated by John Elcock from 19th Septemer – 25th October
- Spirituality curated by Angelo Madonna from 7th November – 21st December
- Weavers a parallel programme of performance, talks, workshops and readings will be curated by Silvia Battista.
Gawain is a masterpiece text of the Middle Ages. The poem tells the story of King Arthur’s headstrong young nephew who after a dramatic bargain with a mysterious figure faces a long journey in which he must, quite literally, keep his head. Sir Gawain’s quest ‘into the wilderness of the Wirral’ is a fourteenth century narrative that will be given a radical 21st century interpretation by the artists.
Featured artists for Into the Wyld include: Angelo Madonna – Silvia Battista – John Elcock and Patric Rogers in collaboration with Amodali – Abbie Bradshaw – Nick Ball – Alice Colquhoun – Kris Darby – Will Dickie – Ryan Gauge – Anna Jane Houghton – Adrian Jeans – Oak Luca – Brendan Lyons – Izzie Major – Piotr Marchewka – Paul Mellor – Margaret O’Brien – Attila Olah – Nicky Perrin – Eleanor Rees – Sarah Jane Richards – Andrew Shaw – Craig Sinclair – Camille Smithwick – Pierce Starre – Angela Stringer – Serah Stringer – Catherine Swire and Niamh Tam.
Professor Sarah Peverley (Liverpool University) will open the programme on the 3rd August with a talk on the poem’s history and textual brilliance and the real and imaginary landscapes that Sir Gawain passes through. Each exhibition will offer a family workshop led respectively by artists Madeleine Smart and Alexandra Hales. Associate Professor Catherine Morris (Liverpool Hope University) will moderate artists’ conversations with the public at the end of each exhibition.
The symposium Spirits of Place will take place as part of the programme on 12th October – find out more and book via the link below.
Material Matters is an artists’ collective and co-operative engaged in artistic and curatorial practices that explore the inter-relationship between materiality, aesthetics and performativity under a collaborative praxis the artists call ’emotional minimalism’.
Into the Wyld is supported by Wirral Borough of Culture 2024 and Liverpool Hope University.