Andia Coral Newton South East London based maker and project coordinator
Poster design: Natasha Eves
GUILD
15 - 18 August, 2024Filet Space, London
Curated by Andia Coral Newton
The artists of GUILD invite you into the world of warp and weft.
Tapestry is among the most ancient forms of artistic expression and human ingenuity. From the oldest needle in the world discovered in Denisova Cave in Russia, dating back 50,000 years, to the fragments of flaxen yarn based textiles discovered in the Bronze Aged time-capsule at Must Farm in the UK, the ancient backstap weaving traditions of South America, to Chinese silk production which commenced during the Neolithic Yangshao culture. Hand-weaving has shielded us from the cold and given us the power to preserve our stories for millennia.
But why do we hand-weave today? Since the industrial revolution, the need for hand-weaving has been eliminated in many parts of the world. And yet textiles are having their moment in the auction houses and contemporary galleries of the West.
Come and sley the reed with us, adjust the tension, thread the heddles, wind the bobbin. We want to give you an insight into the labour of love that is tapestry weaving, and show you why we still do it.
Featuring:
Maria E André
Natasa Heydra
Molly Kent
Andia Coral Newton
Anna Olsson
Patrick Stratton
ATHENA Mothership
Maria E. André is a Franco-Bolivian pluridisciplinary artist based in Brussels. Her work takes the form of an installation combining textiles and sculpture, in which she develops a ritual practice around materials with which she begins a quest of gestures. With this protocol, she seeks to give substance to these fertile projects, to anchor them.
In constructing her ritual, she shapes her plural identity, between the West and the Andes, by questioning the know-how and epistemic resources at her disposal, from historical archives to oral stories, in order to create new imaginaries. Vestiges of a time that does not exist. In this way, she questions the hierarchical dissociations between craft and contemporary art, between North and South.
Maria E. André graduated in 2020 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. She has shown her work in various institutions and galleries in Europe (France, Belgium, Netherlands, UK, Portugal) and recently in Bolivia, her country of origin. She has received several awards and taken part in international residencies (Spain, Netherlands, Bolivia).
Natasa Heydra (b. 1974, Rotterdam, NL) is an artist and project coordinator based in Rotterdam. Throughout Natasa's works are themes such as belonging, loss and identity.
As a daughter of migrants with little to no knowledge about her family history, these themes affect her on a personal level. But it is the complexity of these issues on a universal level she finds important to explore.
She does so by using various traditional and contemporary weaving, patchwork and quilting techniques. And through a kind of visual language that has emerged over time with which she translates textual- and musical compositions into textile compositions. The cultural heritage of textiles as a living tradition inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants plays an important part here. It is about connecting, connecting to others, through time and space.
Natasa’s work has been exhibited in the The Netherlands and Denmark.
Molly Kent (b.1995, Birmingham) is a textile artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland who represents mental and physical health notions through mediums such as rug tufting and weaving. They portray contemporary existence regarding social media and internet living and how this affects our perception of self. This stems from their personal experiences of their mental health condition CPTSD but also reflects on broader anxieties and fears that have come to their attention due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kent's work has been exhibited and collected across the world, including the United States, Australia, across Europe and the UK.
Andia Coral Newton (b. 1998, Croydon, UK) is an artist and project coordinator based in London, working predominantly across textiles, sound art and installation. The work she makes primarily focuses on phycological self-preservation, storytelling through contemporary textile techniques, and the conceptual uncoupling of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ history which Andia believes has resulted in ecological and cultural damage. Primarily a weaver, Andia’s research also touches on the interconnection between textile making and gender, and consequently the way in which we collectively perceive Art History in relation to craft, industrialisation and domestic practices.
Andia’s work has been exhibited in the UK, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.
Anna Olsson: “I try to understand the world in my loom and the tapestries become my answer to change. I weave because I want to say something. I listen, see and meet people. I think, ponder and images arise. Image that then become tapestries.
I am a textile artist and I mostly weave tapestries on a loom. Since my degree in 1995, I have worked in my own studio and had solo exhibitions and participated in various collective exhibitions, both in Sweden and abroad. My pictures are built up of surfaces in different colors through composition and rhythms. I like strong colors and the woven surface. I often work according to a cohesive theme. My artistry has always been strongly driven based on a political vision within me.”
Patrick Stratton (b. 1994, Lewisham, UK) work merges weaving and mechanics with electronics to document micro social systems. Inspired by writers like Samuel Beckett, he highlights small human moments from a playful, existentialist perspective. His series, “Things I Do Sometimes,” employs a scientific-like approach, listing actions with objects in a regularly occupied space. Stratton transforms these into moving tapestries, often animating them with motors. The outcomes vary; some pieces work consistently, while others function briefly, resulting in either stable mechanical tapestries or short videos with archived pieces.
Patrick’s work has been exhibited in the UK, USA, Italy and Germany
ATHENA (Mothership, they/them) is a humanoid spaceship that traverses through time, space, and she ages in between. Everything flows in and out yet love is the only thing the vessel holds. ATHENA is currently attached to Earth and has completed 26 solar orbits by 2024. ATHENA acts within a consciousness zone where instinct and intention are one.
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