Anonymous
General Note:
[…] Ellipses Journal for Creative Research endeavours to make bare the process of research and development in creative and artistic research. This is for readers / viewers an opportunity and mechanism to see the types of academic critique engaged with creative research and to make visible the responses and development.
The following peer review was produced blind and in process, the artist / author has subsequently been given the opportunity to respond and develop both the theoretical and interactive parts of the article before publication. What you see published has been edited post this review.
Which aspects of the submission are of interest / relevance and why?
The research methodology and stated aims are clear, the artist has presented an interesting project that merges ideas of self and body through performative crafting within a collaborative setting. There is a lineage of artists that work within this field that would be interesting to converse with the artist about. For example, Antoni’s evocation of self through weaving and to Fouche’s presentation of the act of making as central to his practice. Both deal with embodiment in a slightly different manner, but their echoes situate artist’s practice to give nuance to way the body is evoked through the artists labour.
How are the artistic and research outcomes represented?
The presentation of the project within an online contact point that straddles a range of media is very effective. I personally found the way the text and images act in sequence as the warp and the weft of the project as conceptually appropriate. The concept of weaving together a project fits well, but there are minor slippages between form and content that could be refined.
How well does the design support the submission?
Visually the project is striking, the dense woven surfaces and the stark black and white pages of text each draw attention to the surface of the screen and a meaningful skin through we read each other as much as we read ourselves. The range of media is appropriate for the artist’s proposed project and it ties well to the experimental nature of the Ellipses journal.
The split-screen feed of information the viewer can navigate on the left accompanied by the infinite loop of weaving on the right is appropriate for the submission. It is a pity that the loop in the clip isn’t seamless, as that would have added a distortion of our experience of time. With that being said, I am not sure if as many viewers will spend the same amount of time just staring at the movement of the crafter’s hands before clicking through that section.
Are there any ethical or legal concerns?
The only ethical issue would be the navigation of how the artist represents themselves as well as their collaborators. Notation is made of the circumstances of production, but this is not as extensive as would have been ideal. This structure is not clear in the current submission aside from the casual notes of gratitude at the start of the project, but I am not sure if that is a side-effect of the anonymity required for the review process.
Conclusions and and pre publication revision:
The position of the weaving in relation to the sense of self is clear – although only explicitly presented within the “body as a site of coded knowledge’ section. I query the insertion of the body presented as an entirety claiming space on the screen as well as delineating the trace of the body on the cloth secured behind the figure.
It has made me ponder how the fragmentation of the body, and the metaphor of the cloth as embodied, but the artists body as absent functions in relation to the work. This might need to be addressed visually or textually at some point. If the trace of the body is a prominent feature in many of the works before the weaving process, it might be pertinent to present that in some way.
The ‘working images’ section include reference to photographic/printmaking methods, which might be misinterpreted as a minor contradiction to the aforementioned stated knotting, enmeshing and embodiment. This is largely due to the print’s capacity to hold a multitude of layers with an obscure singularity and visual clarity – as opposed to the more sculptural works which seem to grow as a multi-layered mass as more time and energy is invested in it. It reads as an issue related to containment and representation, where the inclusion of that structured and ordered way of rendering the images is contradicting the conglomeration of items, materials and traces of the artist’s hand. Both weaving and printing occurs within a frame, but the process that generates that framed content could be articulated clearer. I do note that there are pigments deposited on some of the substrates, but it is not clear if these are generated by the printing processes or an additional experiment (perhaps painting as alluded to in the statement) – any clarity on that issue and the link between the two processes would benefit the reading of the work.
Given the interest in process and repetition I was not sure if the artist would be keen to pursue more complexity in relation to how each is addressed. For example, the pacing of the image sequence and the text if one clicks on the weaving loop in the right hand panel, it seems there is an opportunity to allow the text to grow incrementally with each click through, or have various fragments of text appear and disappear rather than reveal the text in its entirety.
Overall, I am impressed by the quality of this submission, which has made me long for my hand-crafted loom. The subtlety and care of the images of various individuals’ hand working the surface of the weave was quite a poetic element in the project – especially given the contrast to the stark text – and how that dual reading presented the weave as laboured over time by many participants. Given the historical root of weaving as a technique to render materials for other processes of production, the inversion of weaving as an act unto itself with the express purpose of representing or interrogating the weaver is quite fascinating. The suggestions made above might be a projection of my own interest in materiality, process and repetition, and may thus not be essential revisions. Since these thoughts are not addressed in the text I felt it important to highlight them, but with that being said I do acknowledge that the text is not intended as a traditional text but rather a space to open up spaces for dialogue around the meanings of the multitude of forms we encounter and create in the world.
