“Every lasting layer of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished….”

This is a title to a 2006 installation by Nairy Baghramian. An apt point from which to start this blog.

Something that has stayed with me from the ILLUMinations exhibition (curated by Bice Curiger) at the 2011 Venice Biennale is Baghramian’s more recent  installation. The silicon pieces draped on aluminium table had a sense of being left over from an unknown process. Messy seams and edges. Mistakes. Generosity.

The sense of these pieces of silicon as workable remnants of a process reminded me of some photos I took when I stumbled into a pattern maker’s workshop in the East End.

I have looked at block patterns as a source material for some years now, adopting methods such as drafting, reverse engineering and draping to produce form. Just read this informative article about the evolution of pattern-making: of particular interest to me is the way in which software is developing to allow patterns to be tweaked or adjusted according to a body scan of an individual.

Do I have a sense of nostalgia towards traditional pattern making templates?…As objects that have used repeatedly and revised, dismantled; that have been generated through the tracing of fabric around the body, following its movements?

Having seen the Lygia Pape exhibition at The Serpentine last week I have been looking again at work from her contemporaries Helio Oititica and Lygia Clark. Below images from Oiticica’s ‘Bolides’ series. Theatre/prop/puppet show/peep show/mindspace…inviting esoteric pleasure, the model of an immersive environment. This article by Suely Rolik gives a rich context to this work. It reminded me what it means to have been creating radically different possibilities in terms of subjectivity at that time, and the confusing problem of how those new cartographies drawn out became/become subsumed by cultural capital.