Welcome to the last in a series of four open lectures at Hus28 at the Royal Institute of Art, focusing on Textiles.
Natasha Marie Llorens (Professor in Art Theory) will present Figure and Ground: An Overview of Textile Materiality in Contemporary Art [Figuration], the latter of two lectures that give a broad overview of these material and discursive entanglements in the work of contemporary artists.
She will draw on the work of art historians T’ai Smith and Julia Bryan-Wilson and gender studies theorist Eve Sedgewick. The second lecture will address figuration, both that which is woven into an artwork’s surface or made into a volume; it will take as its starting point the work of Hannah Ryggen, Diedrick Brackens, Jagdeep Raina, Mike Kelly, Afra Eisma, Sarah Lucas, Cecilia Vicuña and Sophy Naess.
The use of textiles in fine art has long been entangled with craft history, with the material cultures of the working classes and rural communities. Artists who work with textiles have often either come from or borrowed from indigenous communities, and claimed feminist and queer working methodologies openly.