Dappled Things
An Exhibition by Defne Tutus and Katherine Earle curated by Kathie Halfin
Opening Thursday, October 14, 2021, 7-8pm
@ Academy of St. Joseph, 111 Washington Place NY, NY
“Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;” - Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins
Weaving is a creation story. Just as nature’s seemingly distinct and particular living organisms work as a unit to uphold life, warp and weft join the stuff of the universe to make up our world. The exhibition “Dappled Things'' brings together the work of Katherine Earle and Defne Tutus, artists whose explorations of weaving reflect on the elemental and intrinsic connection humans have with nature. Through weaving and other textile processes, the artists’ textile work offers vivid and colorful material compositions that incite the movement, texture, light and playfulness of the natural world. Whether it be through metallic ‘dazzles’ as weavings capture the light with shivers of organic material mined from within the earth, or stripes of color made from plastics, also derived from deep within our planet, their weavings are celebrations of the natural world in its many manifestations.
Inspired by the poem “Pied Beauty” written by Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877, they call attention to the ways we can induce materials to echo the multicolored, and varied structures, surfaces, shapes and patterns that exist in nature - in the sky, on animals’ skin, and in fields of grass where creatures roam and humans work. Hopkins uses old and unfamiliar words such as pied, dappled, brinded, and rose-moles. Part of the beauty of poetry is learning to let go of the initial difficulty of making sense of every word and letting the entirety of the poem communicate something which is impossible to put into exact words. Similarly, weaving imparts something which transcends the sum of its parts.
The practice of weaving is an ancient technology that has persevered. While traditionally practiced on a loom, weaving can also be produced by hand on a flat surface by overlapping vertical-warp with horizontal-weft threads. Most often practiced with fibers such as silk, cotton, linen or wool, weavings can also be made with materials from daily life. The praxis of weaving spurs interest in further altering the fabric through alchemy and adornment. Katherine Earle chemically alters her fabrics with dyes or rust and embellishes surfaces with additional materials, such as embroidery and layering metal foils. Defne Tutus has developed a long practice of collecting packaging, tape, vintage ribbons and fabric scraps which she then incorporates into her tabby weavings. Both artists are scavengers of discarded fragments which they cull from refuse, and careful attention to detail and craft honors the materials that humans regard as useless and discard in their daily life.
The work in Dappled Things questions and proposes that we reconsider some of the ways we categorize the stuff of our lives. Ideas that we assign, like: precious vs. junk, progress vs. decay, are gently amended as the artists transpose materials. Beauty refracted through garbage and wrought from waste urges us to rethink the speed with which an object or its packaging becomes discarded and strive to improve our habits by wringing more use, and even magic, out of the things we bring into our lives.
Woven surfaces have always been linked to essential spheres of life and surrounding nature. For the artists, making art is a way of giving physical form to their admiration and veneration of nature and a way to express their personal responsibility and vision for the future. Weaving is their manner of taking the threads of the universe and creating something new made of meaning and value. Each element of our existence, from the finches’ wings to the firecoal chestnuts, are bound by the invisible warp and weft that work in tandem to hold up the sky.
A fiber artist, multimedia sculptor and writer, Katherine Earle is based in Spanish Harlem, New York. Her work has been shown in two-person and group exhibitions internationally including Copeland Gallery, ABC No Rio, Sculptors Alliance, Art Aqua Miami, SVA, Site:Brooklyn, The KUBE studios and Diagonale. She has participated in residencies in Canada and the United States, including 77Art and ChaNorth Residency, and has a BFA in Fibres from Concordia University in Montreal. She is a member of Incredible Incubator, an artists collective focused on engaging the environment in unexpected ways, and has participated in fundraisers including with Textile Artists for Movement Voter Project and Thirst, an auction for No More Deaths. She was recently granted a studio allowance through FST StudioProjects Fund, and her website can be found at: https://www.katherineearle.com/
Defne Tutus is an artist, writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. in Art History from Tufts University. She also studied fashion design at FIT, fiber art and metal working at SVA and participated for many semesters in NYC Crit Club. She has shown her work at SVA, Copeland Gallery in London, ABC No Rio, Tussle Magazine Projects and Site:Brooklyn. She has participated in fundraisers for Open Source Gallery, Textile Artists for Movement Voter Project, and Thirst: a fundraiser and art auction in association with No More Deaths. She is a member of Incredible Incubator, an artists collective born in 2020 with an interest in work which interacts with the surrounding environment in unexpected ways. They present art shows on their website theshapeofthingswecreate.com Thru fiber, beads, rocks, metal, plastic and hair worked together in textile making practices, Defne Tutus uses the power of ornament to transform familiar materials into magical constructions. Her website is opticalmixture.com