Artwork title : Roots, Textile Artist Book Sculpture (Image Copyright © Matthew Burch Photography 2020/2021)

Roots, Experimental Textile Artist-Book Sculpture, Length 45 cm (roots folded), Width 19 cm (book closed), 90 cm (roots extended),  Depth 5 cm, Weight 0,520 kg. Handmade, hand-woven spine, antique linen, Iris leaf cordage, found materials, silk, linen yarn, natural dyes, hand-made eucalyptus ink. 

At the fore-edge of the book, art and cloth become poetry…

Roots was part of The Book of Becoming Assemblage (2020/21), my first experimental 7 textile artist books, symbolising a metaphoric journey of becoming, examined through notions of familial and cultural roots, passion, resilience, imperishability of art, wonder of knowledge, future informed by intangible heritage given agency through materials and poetic freedom. Roots is infused with ancestral archaeology, creating visual and semantic link between visceral, material plant roots and a notion of roots as individual and shared cultural heritage.

Symbolic allusion to writing, questions of identity, multiculturalism and historicism, memory, loss, constructing whole from fragmentation, absence is transferred into language and cloth, giving it substance, adding value to incompleteness. I work with non-compromising obsessiveness, resulting in deeply emotionally invested outcomes. My revival of heritage natural dying, other laborious handmade techniques and the physical connection of analogue approach conjures up ideas into matter.

Ancient Coptic binding tradition reinforces the idea, past informing present and future celebrating the quality of handcrafted through its open structure. Deliberately retained, intently developed heady aroma of eucalyptus ink, used to create chromatic gradations, appeals to the viewer to engage with all senses – exploring universally identified ability of scent to evoke memories, creating deeper sense of history, inviting the audience to engage and thus, complete my work.

I approach originating colour sustainably, only using natural dyes, omitting metallic salts for mordanting due to the damage to Earth’s topsoil their extraction is causing. I grow some of my own dye plants, also collect local windfall and use food waste. This enables to support what I call a philosophy ‘from soil to soul’ and creates a living colour, - one that changes with time, recording its passage, reflecting transience of life, evanescence in nature celebrating imperfection, nuanced, unrepeatable results. Nature’s rhythms are our own.

Front and back covers are stitch-pleated and steam set to resemble aged vellum, originally used for Codex structures over 2,000 years ago. Moss and silk gauze reinforce the artefact appearance. This unique approach examines the book as an idea and explores semantic capacity of cloth. Cloth, after all, was the first language – Homo sapiens knew how to weave before writing. Possibilities are limitless…

Artist's Social Media: Graduate Showcase: https://gradshows.uca.ac.uk/showcase/elena-sparke-textiles/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curator_of_chance/