Text by Tim Parry-Williams
Kristina Daukintyte & Karina Nøkleby Presttun: New collaborative works (presented in GRIT)
Online exhibition spaces are yet an emerging phenomenon currently gaining some additional traction as a result of global pandemic lock-down. GRIT is one such exercise, a digital presentation of new work by collaborating artists Kristina Daukintyte Aas and Karina Nøkleby Presttun, based in Norway; and Outi Martikainen, of Finland. All three artists explore the medium of textiles, in related but differing manners, and by the use of multiple tools and approaches. Here, through GRIT, they seek to share ideas and tell stories, relinquishing any concern over how unfinished concepts might be, and rather to relish in a state of not ‘over-thinking’. This is perhaps in part, a reaction to the nervousness of our times and an indicator of what maybe to come in art, and the wider cultural world.
While timing and geography unfortunately prevented the physical participation of Outi Martikainen, the new body of work by Daukintyte Aas & Nøkleby Presttun, was briefly unveiled to a limited audience in Bergen, during the COVID-19 lockdown period. As such, while GRIT is a shared platform by all three artists, what follows is a focussed reflection on a direct encounter with that particular work, as part of the whole.
Daukintyte Aas & Nøkleby Presttun, have been collaborating in textile art making for a decade. During this period a shared interest in materiality, and both analogue and digital processes, tempered with individual specialism and understanding (respectively in woven construction, and manipulation), has driven them to seek new meeting places of co-creation, where questions can be asked and new ideas formed or informed by ever-shifting relative perspectives. Works have largely consisted of jointly conceptualised, jacquard woven pieces, drawing on portrait, body or object images, that ask us to question and reconsider identity and association through representation.
With this body of work for GRIT, the duo takes a leap into new territory of making and perhaps ‘unmaking’, through a brave and far more abstract exploration of the woven (and semi-woven) substrate, stridently reworking fine jacquard textile, with the application of clay and latex, and the physical manipulation of form.
Of significance, is the nature of the collaborative act itself. Where previous works have represented shared conceptual and visual input, manifest in singular woven outcomes, here textiles serve as starting points. These haven’t been created especially for the work and are in fact by-products of the research and development process of an industrial system, in which Daukintyte Aas works as a designer. While none the less considered, indeed originally carefully planned for specific use, and as such charged with inherent value and character, they have not made the final cut in those contexts and are technically waste product. To these new base substrates, Nøkleby Presttun brings recent technical insight into the capacity for latex to bond clay, an inherently fragile, permeable, but potentially solid medium, to textile. Together these form a latent mix of unpredictability, uncertainty and perhaps material ephemerality, and as an act of repurposing, the discarded content from one system is placed into another, where it is reconsidered, rematerialized and recontextualised.
Several questions arise. What is the defined nature of the object of making? Who is the maker and what is the process? The work is essentially derived of woven construction, the industrial jacquard loom the primary tool in the ‘creation’ of the pieces, but the full identity arrives much later. Both artists are concerned with craft and its meaning to them as a facilitating tacit knowledge skill set, and as a means of exploring the possibilities or limitations of a given material. This new approach strips back previously defined ways of working together to explore anew, the fundamental nature of the materials and processes at hand.
Weaving remains at the core of the story and while the earlier collaborative works employed this as a method for materialising visual concepts (for example in bringing tactile values to graphic content), here it is the beginning of a very different investigation, which takes the ‘canvas’ of the woven textile (both literally and metaphorically), as the foundation for a new space of interaction. The base fabrics, characteristically detailed with their ‘designed-in' content, are painted, coated and rendered with thick layers of ‘oppositional’ clay or latex which both mask and reinforce the constructed grounds. In places the substrates even appear to become one where clay and latex merge into the woven surface, such that it is hard to know when one ends and the other begins. The new materiality that emerges owes everything to the process of creation.
This is perhaps epitomised in Clay Landscapes, a series of ‘material experiments’ that play with our visual perception of the ‘uneasy’ mix of thick, matt and shiny clay and latex, layered over the thread-based surface. The inter-relationship both hides and reveals through the juxtaposed language of almost daubed and ‘macro’ mark-making, on a relatively ‘micro’ ground. There is a dynamic energy in the interplay of the ‘advancing’ applied surface over the ‘receding’ constructed terrain, where we are at once peeping through spaces, seeing beyond to detailed plains, but conscious of the more immediate, almost ‘plastic’ membrane.
Excavations I takes this application to an extreme where the base woven substrate, is both hidden under thick layers of heavily worked clay and latex, and also revealed in open wounds of finely detailed colour and pattern, with a visual approach perhaps very much in the language of painting. Lost times pushes this notion further with the addition of piercing and fringing, subverting the rectangular ‘painting’ format by extending the content vertically, and in doing so, challenging our reading of the ‘canvas’ and indeed questioning the associated meanings and values in that regard.
Other works champion the separate elements of construction, in a sense ‘deconstructing’ what we perceive as whole to register often-unseen components. LT-15 highlights a particular stage of the woven production system, where one warp is joined to the next by a series of knots. Typical to the industrial context, the technique is essentially about efficiency and is very much a means to an end. The knotted warps make no appearance in the context of textile outcomes and ‘use’ of this aspect is almost completely unheard of, save for example, weaver Christy Matson (US). Here, colour also comes into play, where the visual character of this knotted area is accentuated by contrasting red and white warps. The nature of weaving is such that warp and weft colours usually interact through sequence or alignment to give overall chromatic effect. Here, while somewhat accidental in origin (being from production waste), the unwoven and singular warp is afforded bold, new identity. Jardin suspendu represents another iteration of this act of revealing in its use of exposed, un-woven warp threads, bonded together not with intended corresponding wefts, but rather a thick coating of black latex. Here they are locked in a writhing, twisting formation at once open and closed, and we see thorough materially manipulated ‘gaps’ to a distanced, three-dimensional internal space.
In this latter characteristic, the now large scale, pendulous works also realise a ‘third act’, where the artists have re-imagined the original two-dimensional nature of the textiles. They play with the root format, switching face and reverse, flipping orientation, folding and joining, and inverting content. These actions further distance their oblate beginnings and the pieces arrive at new sculptural forms, with a distinctive, almost figurative presence, increasingly belying their utilitarian origins.
Again, what makes this even more fascinating is the hierarchy of making. The art and craft of the weaver is in sophisticated and timely management of warp and weft, in order to manifest a very particular result. This work treads boldly across that hallowed ground in a near masochistic act. It is of course somewhat freed from preciousness, afforded the luxury resource of ‘waste’ materials. But one wonders how things might be if they were not of a system, but rather created directly to this end. What characteristics might emerge in a different context where intuition meets earlier intent?
This work therefore both relies on and defies the very nature of its making. Ordered networks of fine thread and fabric, previously destined for high-end functional applications, are subverted and transformed in a heady juxtaposition of the fibrous and the plastic, the structural and the liquid. In the relative act of undoing of what we know to be true to conventional textile making, through this spirited adventure we are reminded of Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’, of the brutalising of the clean modernist order. But here perhaps is a version of abstract expressionism built on a foundation of primary understanding, deep appreciation, and a conscious and considered breaking of rules, in the forming of a new and shared language.
Tim Parry-Williams, Professor of Art: Textiles
Faculty of Contemporary Fine Art, Music and Design University of Bergen
Bergen, 03 July 2020
