Review: Cut Weave Throw Print

A Vancouver show focuses on the act of making as it celebrates craft skills and material sensitivity.

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Cut Weave Throw Print brings together four Vancouver-based artists – Rachael Ashe, Amanda Wood, Alwyn O’Brien and Aurora Landin – who share a profound engagement with the materials, processes and craft of their chosen practices. The verbs comprising the exhibition title emphasize active making, a departure from the more common way of characterizing work by genre or medium – here variously paper, textiles, ceramics and printmaking.

Curator Lesley Finlayson, a West Coast painter, has chosen diverse works for this show, on view at Vancouver’s Elissa Cristall Gallery until Sept. 29. But the pieces communicate conceptually and embrace beauty as a natural ally. The energy of the hand runs throughout, creating conversations between works, no matter their physical differences.

Rachael Ashe’s cut-paper pieces grew from her close observations of the historical textiles she encountered when she was a photographer at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto. Her works explode with decorative patterns rendered with crisp and intricate cuts.

Her Scroll Series consists of narrow panels of Tyvek, an industrial material that here resembles fabric, suspended just off the wall. Wielding her knife like a brush, Ashe excised thousands of tiny organic and geometric shapes from the material to create patterns of swirling petals, blowing seeds and crystal lattices. Light shining through the tiny holes generates animated shadows, amplifying the complexity of the visual effect.

Ashe’s Seigaiha Series, named after the Japanese word for wave, consists of smaller works cut from paper hand-printed with streaks of bright colour. Here the cuts are even more delicate and precise, delineating a roiling splash of water. Suspended slightly above their background, the wave-shaped pieces create layers of pattern with crisp cuts, soft shadows and bursts of colour. The overall effect is jewel-like and precious.

Amanda Wood uses repetition and chance to explore networks and relationships in hand-woven textile sculptures that pair natural fibres with simple wooden structures. Confounding the basic grid of plain weave, she manipulates her warp according to random algorithms to produce surprising, if subtle, disturbances in the fabric’s stark surface.

Her most dramatic piece, Disrupted, originates in a tangle of crisp black Japanese paper yarn, which rises through a pine picture frame to tether three black squares of cloth suspended from the ceiling. Evocative and gestural, the work suggests a surge of creative energy freed from the constraints of fine art to communicate through skill and materiality, as well as the re-thinking of traditional practice.

Alwyn O’Brien’s dramatic ceramics explore psychological states. The presence of the hand reveals itself in hundreds of hand-pinched coils piled roughly together to create textured, pulsating forms.

Naked resembles the seed jars found in early cultures. Rising from a narrow base, the form swells to robust shoulders and then bursts into a maze of twisting stems, leaves and blossoms, all unified by their unglazed – naked – surface.

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Alwyn O’Brien, “A Matter of Shadows” (detail), 2017

Alwyn O’Brien, “A Matter of Shadows” (detail), 2017

mid-fire porcelain and glaze, grey: 12” x 17” x 40” and yellow: 11” x 10” x 51” (photo by Ken Mayer)

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Alwyn O’Brien, “A Matter of Shadows,” 2017

Alwyn O’Brien, “A Matter of Shadows,” 2017

mid-fire porcelain, glaze, grey: 12” x 17” x 40” and yellow: 11” x 10” x 51” (photo by Ken Mayer)

A Matter of Shadows consists of two basket-like columns, suggesting, perhaps, the fragility of the conventions and norms that purport to uphold cultural systems. One column is drenched in a greenish ash glaze. Appearing at first as an inchoate clot of twisting coils, the writhing surface resolves on further inspection into a fecund mass of baroque foliage. The effect is visceral, disturbing and dark. The second, a bright yellow, radiates frantic energy, as coil upon coil articulates a thicket of graffiti-like marks. O’Brien’s idiosyncratic work is conceptually rich, suggestive and masterful.

Aurora Landin distills her interests in drawing, painting and photography into large-scale prints. Addressing themes of politics, social issues and autobiography, she responds to events transpiring around her on the surface of etching plates.

The series on view was produced during a 30-day residency in Venice. At the time, a referendum on environmental initiatives proposed by the Berlusconi government was underway, and her fellow printmakers were concerned about the outcome. She produced daily monoprints incorporating imagery from her surroundings, scratching the date at the bottom before cleaning the plate for the next day.

The series, Thirty Days in Venice, culminates in a final work that transforms the evidence of accumulated dates, scratches and injuries into abstract imagery. Using repeated marks, linear elements and subtle textures, Landin creates intimate surfaces that speak to the body through scale and gesture.

The works in Cut Weave Throw Print confirm a growing consensus that traditional skills and sensibility to material play an important role in creating meaningful work. Vested in the craft of their practices, these four artists create challenging works that explore personal concerns. ■

Cut Weave Throw Print is on view at the Elissa Cristall Gallery in Vancouver from Sept. 13 to Sept. 29, 2018. It coincides with the biennial symposium of the Textile Society of America in Vancouver from Sept. 19 to Sept. 23.

Elissa Cristall Gallery

1820 Unit 200 (second floor) Fir Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6J 3B1

604-730-9611

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