11 Mar Simone Landwehr-Traxler
Residency Program: August 2016
Spinning a Yarn
Simone commences with an art residency at Centro Negra in Blanca, Murcia, Spain, a creative investigation of Fair Isle’s unique knitting patterns.
By tracing the mythic origins of this iconic Scottish design, reputedly from Andalusia, the project challenges the assumptions underwriting a seemingly homogenised cultural identity. It highlights the importance of (cultural) osmosis and the spectrum of complex and diverse ideas, underwriting our identity.
Arcing across her practice and research is a critical exploration of the centrality of memory and its implicit and explicit role in defining us. Through uncovering the physical and psychological palimpsests I find etched into our landscapes and communities her response is to make work which deciphers these fragments, re-contextualising them and, by doing so, exploring and exploding the role which the presence of these absences in our lives plays in shaping us.
By amplifying these strands and narratives which we have either lost or forgotten and yet remain vital elements of our identity, her work speaks strongly of our inter-relationship and interdependency with ‘place’.
