Every morning, artist Richard Tuttle looks at a textile from up close. Carefully observing its construction and the ways in which over becomes under and under becomes over… Each thread carries the essence of the act of making, as his friend and fellow artist Agnes Martin used to say, deconstructing landscapes and time into lines, threads. Was this yarn spun clockwise or counter-clockwise? - he asked. What were the intentions of the weaver - who sat there for days, months or even years - and how are they embodied throughout the weave? If the construction of the warp and weft refers to the North/ South and East/West axes, how do weavers situate themselves in this universe? In a ritualized observation of this microcosm and infinity, Richard Tuttle folds the fabric back into his archive and starts to work.
On the other side of the Atlantic, German artist Thomas Bayrle has spent a few years as a teenager in the sound of industrial weaving machines. An experience which has infused his artistic practice with notions of patterns, social fabric and the relationship between the machine and the human. Oscillating between my own interest for textiles and the ways in which they have informed the practices of Richard Tuttle and Thomas Bayrle, this research project does not focus on textile as a medium but rather as a metaphorical and critical image of the world we live in, while exploring the symbolics and realities of their archiving.
(Image: copyright Alexis Gautier)
