The Wrappings

“It is difficult for me to think about art without thinking about play. To play is to move without the heaviness of failure, the resistance of judgement and the shadow of self-consciousness. In my body of work, The Wrappings, play guides me.”

The Wrappings use yarn, wood and time to explore notions of faith in repetition, colour theory and play. The first piece was born from this curiosity of how to create without the fear of failure. By using what Tess had in the studio, off-cuts of wood and left-over yarn, she began wrapping thread around a block using only tension to secure the loose end in place. Tess was struck by how the simple act and combination of these two materials quickly amounted to something more. This slow action of wrapping accumulated to a larger field of thread and it became an act of faith; if she simply repeated, she would arrive somewhere new and this destination being unknown loosened her control over the end result. Tess became enchanted by the transition of micro to macro, and through iterations began scaling, highlighting the effect of the thread accumulating over time.

Also interpreted as a form of deconstructed cloth, the Wrappings borrow the language of weaving; in some pieces they can be seen as weft without a warp or vice versa and in others like The Quilt more than one direction of thread is at play. Moving away from the metaphysical interpretations, the materials also speak to a duality of softness and structure. The use of contrasting materials like yarn, in such a vibrant and synthetic form, against plywood and off-cuts bring into question binaries of the construction of control and play.

The Wrappings at the Alchemy Experiment is Tess’ first international exhibition and with her vibrant thread landscapes and weavings she invites you into a world of colour and play. ‘Rage against the beige’