Welcome to the second 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 [Abstraction], one 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 first lecture will focus on abstraction and will consider the work of Anna Betbeze, Eric Mack, Solange Pessoa, Adrian Vescovi, Helen Mirra, Ayan Farah, Rosemarie Trockel, and N. Dash, among others.
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.