Simple Math

@Knulp

Simple Math Includes works by myself, my mother, sister and partner and for me revisits working with wool and weaving.

Weaving is something I did as a child and remember liking a lot.

An Orange Work, is a weaving I made directly responding to my mothers untitled weaving. This work seemed to have a geometric painterly quality. A weaving that talks about painting or pretends to be a painting is quite funny.

The exhibition responds to an event, the movement of my mother from her home of twenty years to a nursing home couple of blocks away from her house. This happened after she was diagnosed with dementia. When my family and I were packing up her house we discovered six packing boxes of wool, in great condition and in many colours, a lot of them brown. Later my friend Lucy and I went to pick up the wool, we discovered this small work waiting for us. Our journey is documented in the accompanying video work Simple Math.

In the 1970’s mother aspired to be a fibre artists and made several large scale works. The small untiled work in this exhibition was made in the late 1970’s.

My sister Barbara has made embroidered works for many years, and has recently expanded this to include quilts, the striking Tie Quilt the exhibition is formed around is a good example of her approach. Barbara asserts “things come to me… and if you look at them long enough, they will tell you what you should do with them”.

My partner Suzanne used some of the wool to teach herself to knit, these were then used as coverings in the installation of the social sculpture, a special zone for watching the video/road movie.

The exhibitions is about friendship, family, work, the road, the wool, integration and disintegration of family, very personal forms of alienation and finally love and hopefully acceptance.