"Stuffed Full of Pigment" is a collaborative virtual gallery film produced for Gallery 57 (Sussex, England) and Claire Benn, textile artist. The team is Claire Benn (Surrey, England) Andrew Galli (Long Beach, CA), Peter Kutin and Florian Kindlinger (Vienna, Austria) and Katie Vandyck (London, England).
Background: In 2017 Claire Benn visited the Alto Atacama desert in Chile, South America. Overwhelmed by the vastness and size of the desert, she took camera in hand and photographed the landscape. Claire collected raw earth samples from the sliding stones and desert valley and brought them back to the UK where she developed them into pigments using soya milk as a base. Working with linen and cotton canvas, she rubbed the pigments into the cloth and threads and stitched cotton into her canvas. She added in some cases MX procion dyes. The results are warm, neutral works of wall art, emboldened by the colors of the earth and the Chilean landscape.
"...A piece of cloth is always my starting point. Uncomplaining of a sharp needle and welcoming lines of thread. Porous enough to absorb pigments, strong enough to support them and tough enough to withstand an electric sander. Using earth pigments connects me back to the wilderness. Binding it in acrylic medium or soya milk allows me to make washes that soak through the cloth - cotton canvas, linen or hemp are strong enough to take the weight of the pigment and build up layers to communicate the texture of soil, sand, grit and rock. But the cloth is also open enough to yield to stitch; rows, lines or scatterings of thread offer a visual trace of time and a literal surface texture that fingertips can feel.
These are my quiet materials, used to make art that evokes solitude, stillness and silence...." -- Claire Benn, February 2021
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Claire says --
"...The works in this video showing are based on the landscape of the Atacama Desert, visited in 2017. It is a varied, multi-layered and primal environment: aggressive, jagged, crumbling, serrated, smooth, undulating, slithery, yielding. The colour palette is extraordinary: burnt umber, rust orange, yellow ochre, sand, buff, pale mauve, brown and due to the high salt content of the earth, white. The place has an ancient feel, a sense of the ground being somehow sacred.
Water is also represented; the lack of it in the form of dry river beds or salt pans and an excess caused by abnormal weather. Clear, bright, warm mornings. Benign and fluffy clouds at lunchtime. By mid-afternoon, murderously grey clouds unleashed their load causing the river (normally a trickle) to flood. This unsettled weather was welcome as the varying light constantly changed the landscape, offering me more and more to contemplate and draw inspiration from."
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Video by: gallicreative.com
"Desert Sound" - Atacama desert sounds courtesy Kutin|Kindlinger (kutinkindlinger.com)
Claire’s artworks photographed by Katie Vandyck (katievandyckwebsites.co.uk/)
Visit Claire's Website: clairebenn.com
15 фев 2021
