Candice Okada

Residency period: October-November 2019

The practice of Candice Okada focuses on the concept of economic exchange, or monetary exchange, and how this pertains to our contemporary ideas of labour and value.

Okada works with techniques of crochet lace to create installations that respond to the geopolitical profile of Blanca Murcia, Spain. She is attempting to undertake a project that dissects and investigates the complex relationship between institutionalized control of people via borders, mapping and materiality.

Today, we tend to think of borders and nations of resolved and secure, but mass flight, forced displacement and the increasing hopelessness of this situation easing up, has been threatening the perceived stability of constructed liberal democratic states, both ideologically and physically. I am interested in the notion of the grid, as it pertains to both the location, structure and control of land, and its (the grids) predominance within filet-crochet lace techniques. Furthermore, while borders are thought of as walls and partitions outlining the geographic profile of a country, they also exist within countries’ airports and train stations, acting as bubbles of transient, indeterminate political space.

By using both the structure of the physical art-object, and its immaterial traces, in the form of shadows, this work attempts to illuminate both the visible and invisible political discourse surrounding the nature of borders and territories. The labour-intensive and opulent  nature of this project also addresses contemporary concerns regarding capitalist modes of production, value and consumption.