Your works often pick familiar icons or visuals, but then you deconstruct and reimagine them. Can you tell us about how you approached the motifs on your latest body of work, Tanabana?
I like to think of it more as a ‘re-imagining’ and making new. There is a literal kind of reimagination and a more metaphorical sort. In my last body of work, Something About Paradise at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, I was metaphorically re-imagining other peoples’ memories and stories of what ‘paradise’ means to them. These were verbalizations of stories, as I was processing,
I was coming up with the visuals for them. For the Tanabana series, I collected beautiful textiles from the family library and then photographed them. I was literally breaking them down by cutting them into little strips and re-weaving them to come up with new patterns. The Tanabana series was a more physical re-imagination of the patterns that were there, and reweaving to come up with new patterns. I am now telling a new story through them. I approached this series essentially with re-imagination and retelling.
In the larger works, there is also a re-weaving of stories in a more metaphorical sense. All the figures in the stories are wearing designs from the Tanabana series. That is the more obvious connection between the two collections. I bring together figures from different stories in a single scene. What the new story is, is for the viewers to discover and determine.
*tanabana: also means “warp and weft” technique
