Mend: Love, Life & Loss
On display through Dec. 5
Free
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
54 St. Philip St.
(843) 953-5680
www.halsey.cofc.edu
Fiber has always worked itself into our lives one way or another.
It moves silently around the edges until we encounter it through warm blankets or T-shirts against dry skin. Only then do we remember it’s there.
Mend: Love, Life & Loss is like that. It brings fiber out of the shadows and into a remarkably bright light. Its artists convincingly make the case that fiber is an obvious choice for expressing human drama, because it’s mutable.
It’s able to bend and tighten, break and repair, comfort and bind. Using this not-so-contemporary craft material, Mend‘s artists have managed to create progressive pieces that reflect the past — and how things have changed.
We tend to associate threads, fabric, and fiber with domestication and feminine handiwork: the simple and uncomplicated time-kills of a bored housewife. Mend‘s artists have a humorous and somewhat disturbing take on turning this once-ordinary craft into a respected art form.
Susan Harbage Page is a fantastic example. She sweetly embroiders fearful phrases — such as, “If I asked too many questions …” — into otherwise delicate handkerchiefs. Her intricate embroidery looks painfully time-consuming. You find yourself increasingly uncomfortable, as if witnessing the brief seconds before a heated argument in an unhappy marriage.
Women are still seen as emotional creatures, and, indeed, most feel the urge or burden to mend their homes. But, Mend asks us, to what avail?
Elements are repaired, stains and spills are made clean. Yet things keep breaking, staining, and spilling. We are constantly mending.
It’s an endless cycle that all people, not just women, endure.
Yet there’s comfort in the endless repetition of this act. To learn by making mistakes and then finding a way to fix them — this is what makes us human.
The artists of Mend have brought the nature of this repetition to the surface through the use of repetition and replication. Jon Coffet was able to accomplish this with clothes lines arrayed with miniature men’s shirts.
Each of Coffet’s shirts matched an individual description of whom the fabric belonged to and how it came to be hanging on a gallery wall. Each has a memory of its own, a journey it has taken.
Whether it’s looking progressively forward or nostalgically back depends on your point of view. Either way, Mend is able to surprise at every turn.
You think you know what you are about to see. You think you have it all figured out. But then you don’t.
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