… Wish you were here (but it’s really nice being here on my own) …
Stitched Landscapes
June 16th- July 14th 2018
CornerStore Merchants, 220 Barker St Castlemaine
CiPi is an artist who uses the idea of wayfaring to motivate her creative practice; walking and rambling through landscape in order to know and understand the environment we live with. This meditative and quiet contemplation of moving through nature evokes a practice of reflexivity, and this ongoing project to use embroidery based narratives pays homage to domestic craft and related maker cultures. There are poignant links between moving through landscape and capturing the poetics of space and time through the process of stitching stories that we love to be reminded of. CiPi loves walking with thread.
CiPi believes that it’s OK to hang out alone within this socially driven and often chaotic culture. Of course CiPi understands that we are never truly alone; the voice of landscape is not silent, like the performance of self in our heads. To engage in the world on foot and then to represent this through art creates alternative ways of listening. Listening to the self and listening to other through quiet contemplation and the process of composing enthralling works with fingers, needle and thread.
These ways of listening through the body allow beautiful tiny tales to emerge, a poignant sense of overhearing through multiple ways of doing. And the choice to do that is enough. We feel full afterwards, as we reconfigure ourselves to reflect on the beauty around us. This activity of threading, stitching and making enables us to consider the current shifts occurring through a gendered practice of peaceful intimacy, emotional labour and above all, creativity.
Klare Lanson
Walk through the exhibition with me
