Solo Exhibition
5 September - 17 October 2026

Exhibition Opening: Saturday 5 September 2026
Exhibition Closure: Saturday 17 October 2026 Share Facebook Twitter

I started out wanting to create two distinct post-apocalyptic installations. The first representing a return to primitivism, and the second a technological utopia. All the artworks (with the exception of the generative coded projection) are made with lace and weaving techniques.

In “The Village” (The neo-primitivism installation) all the artworks have single-word, natural or found material captions “Eucalyptus”, “Linen”, “Cotton”, “Karakul”, “Audio tape” etc. emphasizing the very human need for elemental connection – that we cannot help ourselves but be crafty and nimble-fingered. My imaginary return to primitivism after the fall of civilization hints at the darker side of human ignorance: imaginative but flawed, possibly violent cosmologies, but also the potential for genuine connection to the earth. I imagined my ‘savages’ to have developed a cult around textile construction geometries and surfing as if the only artifacts that survived the fall were a bobbin lace instruction manual and a couple of surf magazines.

“The End of Time” on the other hand, contains artworks that were made in collaboration with, or because of computation, algorithms, artificial intelligence. The only natural fibre here is silk, which I’ve always considered distinctly “alien”. (Somehow the plant fibres and mammalian fibres don’t have that ‘feel’ of unfamiliarity.) “The Silent Weave” towers like a monolith above the viewer at 3m tall, and the base pattern for its pure bobbin lace construction was discovered by an algorithm (written by my fellow lacemaker, the Canadian computer scientist Veronika Irvine.) These pure machine-invented lace patterns continue to enthrall me with their own strangeness, unlike anything a human being might come up with. “Drift”, a delicate lace panel woven with silk floss, was made without pattern or a grid, so the net structure of the lace became fluid with points seemingly more attuned to fluid dynamics than Cartesian geometry. This is an emergent feature of the improvised process. The algorithm that created the celestial forms (or microbial entities in a primeval fluid substrate?) is consciousness itself that recursively asks itself “What now?”, “Where to now?”…

— Text by Pierre Fouché