Seeliikumine (That skirt motion)
[2022]
oil pastel on gifted curtain fabric from Maie Barrow, 55x185cmExhibited in Kudos All Stars, Goodspace Gallery
Image description: ‘Seeliikumine’ installation at Goodspace Gallery beside Mika Benesh’s ‘iraqi amulet study at the sydney jewish museum’ & ‘protective amulets’ (2022)Photo courtesy of Kudos Gallery [15 June 2022]
“As a child, my Vanamamma had no permanent place to call home in Estonia. Caught between kihelkonnad (church parishes), this scroll of movements is an itinerarium or delta, accumulating place-memory as it runs dislocated from the objective thalweg of historical time.”
As I’ve become more engaged in textile history and particularly Estonian folk dress, I have always aspired to one day create my own folk costume set based on the birthplace of where my grandparents once lived. Estonian men’s folk dress is vastly underrepresented in collections and displays and this has always been an ongoing passion project of mine I hope to continue. After inquiring further into where my ancestors came from, I found that this notion of being from one place is fraught with innaccuracy and did not reflect truly my family’s history. To counter this, I wanted to create a visual map inspired by river deltas and ancient Roman itineraria (travel maps) to depict the journey in which my grandmother took growing up prior to leaving to Germany as a displaced person (DP).
The daughter of a police sergeant, her movements were influenced by much larger national and continental crises facing the Eastern European front. With my Vanamamma’s assistance and the aid from the book “Eesti Kihelkondade Värvid” by Reet Piiri I started drawing.
Drawing visual inspiration by American modernist painter Georgia Totto O'Keeffe, Azerbaijani textile artist Faig Ahmed, as well as contemporary illustrator and graphic designer Amber Vittoria, the works explore the visual motif of the molten, warped & distorted. Hues bleed, like xeroxed sheets of paper, down the work descending and cascading like a waterfall of memory and colour. Shifting tonally from one segment to the other, detail slowly gives into broader strokes of colour and shape symbolising the paradoxical way in which memory from much younger years feels so much clearer and defined and becomes looser and open as time moves on.
The work is made with Micador oil pastels, ones very similar to those used by kids beginning their art journey in primary school. I love the materiality of pastel, its roughness, its pitch like stickyness and its vibrancy - pressed firmly and rigidly into the velvet-like curtain fabric, it felt like the appropriate medium to use for a work explicitly dealing with childhood memory. Furthermore the occasional marks, smudges and mishaps felt like important reminders that its a messy process of physically making and conceptually unpacking family history.
Photo courtesy of Kudos Gallery [15 June 2022]
Memory and stories lose definition and can often stop without any logic or reason. I find there’s beauty in this fragility.
