The ties that bind, Woolgathering and Spell it out
pieces from Open-field (2022)

Last summer’s plant ties cut from old t-shirts; nails salvaged from rotting pallets once used to hold motherload-motherlode compost heap; wood salvaged from the neighbourhood worm farm, slug trails.

Exhibited in Tender Webs (2023), Wormhole Gallery and Studio, Edgecumbe, curated by Jordan Davey-Emms.

Tender Webs
Jordan Davey-Emms

This exhibition celebrates our connections to the living environments we make our homes in.

The artists featured in Tender Webs look closely at the green and growing places around them. They use video, publications, installation, and textile work to show us what they see. Familiar places like gardens, friend’s houses, and ancestral lands become lively beings to take notice of, befriend, and collaborate with. 

Xin, Zoe, and Georgina observe specific habitats, and take part in processes (like composting, DIY-ing, setting out food for slugs, and carefully applying uku and thread) that entangle their own lives with the many strands of life that surround them. 

When this show was forming, I was thinking of the way a spider makes its web, and observing the tendrils of vines that were growing and curling around neighbouring plants and structures. Webs and tendrils are processes that enable living things to cling to one another. Living threads wander, reach out, and pull the world closer…

Photos: Jordan Davey-Emms