“An Enchanted Loom” Exhibition

“An Enchanted Loom” Exhibition

The Clemente

This event has ended.

The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.
-Charles G. Sherrington, Man on His Nature

In Man on His Nature, Charles Sherrington’s description of the brain’s state of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness - the twilight area of dreams and reality - is a marvelous encapsulation of the enigmatic sequences of memory. In this phase, the threads of actual recall and unconscious fantasy are blurred, affecting our perception as we transit from one world to the next. Small constellations of recollection connect into patterns, reverberating into fractals of time and space.

An Enchanted Loom takes this description and applies it to the ritualistic and meditative action behind the craft of textiles and ceramics. Using repetitive pattern as a starting point, the artists weave this motif into the conceptual process of each work - along with “a shifting harmony of subpatterns.” Robin Kang, an American fiber artist, constructs glitched-out circuit boards within her tapestries, reminiscent of the brain’s processing power as it scans through figments of consciousness. Kelley Donahue inhabits a metaphysical approach to her clay sculptures, using ritualistic and totemic symbols to portray collective archetypes of the human condition. Lea Thomas, using heritage weaving and dying traditions pulls on the web of an ancestral lineage that revolves around a symbiotic relationship with the land we stand on. It is in the communal space of the Clemente Center that these three emerging artists presented in the exhibition will, together, weave a plush environment of diverse tactility.

Media

• Sculpture
• Installation

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