Yes. It's #FabricFriday.
This week's #FF winner is German artist Lia Anna Hennig who makes beautiful, surreal and very Jan Svankmajeresque drawings, prints and illustrations, that are all about the mouth, with witty (but hinting at the dark side of visceral pleasures) titles such as Ice Cream Bomb, Milking, Eat Me, Lust For Life.
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| All above: Lia Anna Hennig |
Hennig's hanging sausage sculptures, culminating in her sausage curtain 'Himmelbett" (German for four-poster bed, but literally translating as 'sky bed'), called Salami Dream; she takes this, her fellow, German into art heaven and back to Jan Svankmajer, who is another visceral omnivore and attacker of all senses. Hennig's tactile textiles have a greedy gutsiness, and Svankmajer's Little Otik would have guzzled them down in a flash.
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| Lia Anna Hennig |
Svankmajer, a surrealist of the first order, is most famous perhaps for a series of tactile experiments, wherein something as simple as a rolling pin covered in nails and animal fur uses big contrasts to awaken our senses. And 'Hoelzchen' and 'Stoeckchen' feature regularly in his tactile sculptures.
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| All above: Jan Svankmajer |
Which brings me to where I wanted to get to in the first place, Katie Gaudion, another textile artist, and her innovative use of Svankmajereques techniques to create ultra-sensory fabrics made into sculptures to help stimulate our primary senses of touch, smell and sound.
Gaudion's research practice wants to help people with conditions such as autism to embed themselves in the world.
Katie's starting point is that sensory experiences are fundamentally shaped by the design of our material landscape, affecting the way we perceive, navigate and experience space. Katie changes the shape and conventional sensory structures of our world to change how people root themselves into it.
Through her fabrics she investigates how an understanding of the sensory qualities of materials and spatial-visual thinking might develop dialogue with people on the autistic spectrum who often experience everyday sensations triggered by our material world at unbearable levels - or not at all.
Let's end with Kate Bush's fab Eat The Music and Jan Svankmajer's Economical Suicide, a love poem written for his wife Eva.Try read / listen to it together for the full sensory overload.
Spread your fingers as far apart as possible
Place between them the grain of a pea
Endure
Knees kneeling down on a grater
Endure
Slip a sucking sweet in your mouth
Suck
Your back pressed against the smooth concrete of
a laundry
Endure
One's heels placed into the outflow by the bath
just as the plug has been pulled
Endure
Calves painted with egg yolk
let it dry
and endure
Run water in the basin
Shoes off
Dip your face
Endure
Jan Svankmajer, Economical Suicide, 1979
