Thread

Monica Fierro - Livia Marin – Jorge Sarsale – Rachel Wickremer

A thread….
runs through the whole course of something, connecting successive parts…

Fine filaments of paper or yarn are intertwined, arranged or embroidered in a gradual, time absorbing process. The thread, sometimes hidden, sometimes anticipated, becomes the skeleton of a work. Its absence, suggests the piecing together, the next step in the creative process. At other times, its appearance constructs and adds layers of new meanings and depth.

Monica Fierro embroiders yellowed pages from old books. She chooses only their first pages, where there is no text and which, as a blank canvas, open up to innumerable imaginary journeys. Her meticulous and minuscule stitching, in soft pastel colours, present a discourse of an unknown language. Tiny holes accompany this foreign calligraphy, creating, like Braille, a textured visual landscape. The series “Pages blown away by the Wind”, invite the viewer to imagine his own story. Alongside these, laboriously rolled up coloured pages are amalgamated into small sculptures. Depending how they are positioned, these Assemblages recall dinosaurs, tractors, machinery or unfathomable creatures whose paper vertebrae are joined by an invisible chord. Her pages “become places behind the scenes or even true scenarios, where the characters, suddenly appear, have a dialogue and leave, depending on the story I want to tell”. Monica Fierro was born in Cordoba, Argentina and lives in Buenos Aires. She has exhibited extensively in Argentina and with jaggedart since 2012.

Livia Marin is a London-based Chilean artist whose work has been characterised throughout by large-scale installations and the appropriation of mass-produced and mass-consumed objects. Her works are often displayed in series evoking contrasts between the handmade and the mass production of items. Livia questions the notions of originality, while highlighting the beauty and individuality of her unique pieces. In the series of collages Broken, Livia stitches gold thread over photographic still lives. As an archaeologist is obliged to omit missing fragments of a retrieved object, in these works she uses gold thread to fill in the absent sections of ceramic objects. In Loose Ends, her new series of ceramic works, Livia embeds loose and frayed threads in modelling clay. The grid of abstract pieces either anticipates a process of creation or the beginning of des-integration. In the window, soft-toys are covered in successive layers of plaster and gesso and the final layer, gilded. Cuddly toys, whose limbs are often un-sewn or dismembered, through this layering process, lose definition and softness and become protected from further un-stitching; Through their gilded and hard materiality, they oscillate between the familiar and unfamiliar. Marin has exhibited widely both in her native Chile and internationally.

Jorge Sarsale trained as an architect and his work is greatly influenced by this discipline, using paper to create sculptures or environments. Discarded paper, or pages from old phone books are shredded, cut and devoid of their significance. Then patiently the remains are “woven” as fibres and joined together creating ethereal fabrics or spatial structures. Depending on the material and colour, some may look like wood, metal or paper itself, but always preserving that intrinsic lightness. The work becomes matter, no background, no figure, and displaced meaning. “I work on the idea of what is not visible, that which is so overwhelmingly present it turns invisible; what is beneath the surface, meaning by surface that membrane which allows us to go beyond appearance”. Jorge Sarsale was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina where he lives and works He has exhibited internationally and won various awards.

With densely wrapped surfaces in bright colour threads, Rachel Wickremer creates optical and kinetic works. As the viewer moves alongside the works, a colourful optical illusion is experienced. Rachel aims to push the relationship between colour, form and three-dimensional space. Her practice explores how the slightest shifts in viewing angle can create visual movement and intensity of colour. The lines of thread that sit on the surface of the work serve as a kind of aperture, through which light passes, they can be a way into the painting, or posts to mark the landscape. While creating the works she uses as few elements as possible, and lets each element play its role fully. The application of parallel threads in a repetitive and consistent method accumulates to create tension. Rachel is fascinated by how light, depth and feeling can be rendered through process. Rachel studied Fine Arts and Textiles and her particular interest is to combine found and industrial materials that have opposite or contrasting properties.