Wires ran like thread lines is a collaborative show by Sophie Giller and Faye Rita Robinson, exploring materiality, emotion, dreams, and craft through different processes including tufting, sewing, ceramics, latch-hook, quilting, dyeing, and metalwork.

 

90% of the spiders we see are female. These ancient weavers produce silk, growing, building and weaving complex structures that are five times stronger than steel. The web becomes a foundation for movement, survival and protection. Giller and Robinson take this therapeutic dimension of textile crafts – working, spinning, weaving and winding – as a starting point for exploring emotion. Another key reference point is dreaming and making sense of the strange and often exhausting emotions and stories of the unconscious mind. The works act as a form of textile therapy, giving form to unprocessed emotions the way crafts transform and give meaning to raw materials.  

 

Giller has made ceramic frames to contain textiles, acting as a support for the threads in the way spiders use walls and other surfaces on which to build and weave their webs. These works have painterly compositions that emphasise the handmade, the freeform and the irregular.

 

Robinson’s works explore bodily experiences and the senses, especially vision and taste, as emphasised by the eyes, lips, and goblets that recur throughout. She combines tufted textiles with unique natural materials and images such as shells and clams that both protect and reveal a hidden, precious centre. The protagonists of these works appear as if from a dream. Disembodied, surreal, or hybrid forms that are both eerie and elegant, they float above or lurch in the corners of the gallery, observing our world from theirs.

 

- Josh Mcloughlin

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