Anna King

TEXT TEXTURE TEXTILE CONTEXT

'Mostly, I work with words – TEXT.  The words are the raw material from which I derive inspiration and ideas.  The words are held in journals and diaries that I kept for many years.  Something I wrote twenty years ago might have been interpreted in one way then.  I can look at those words now and see them in an entirely new con TEXT and so interpret them in a new way, but the immediacy of the first emotional response is not lost in the intervening years.  

With the tapestries, the words are sometimes hidden within the TEXTure of the weaving.  The coiled basket forms give the words an enclosed environment to live in, or rest, waiting for the observant enquirer to investigate.  The conTEXT of the basket invites curiosity.  Decorative additions on the surface or interior are there for symbolic as well as aesthetic reasons.  They are not arbitrary, their purpose is to imbue a sense of place, evoke a memory, serve as a token.

Recent applications of the TEXT have seen the poems made more accessible in small boxes, but my preference is for them to be wholly or partially concealed in or on the basket forms.  Sometimes the only way to access them is to destroy the basket: this is the choice I impose on the observer.

Other experiments have taken the form of sealed envelopes built into the fabric of a constructed TEXTile.  Exploring TEXT and applying more decorative modes using calligraphy will play some part in further works that I have planned, as well as weaving tapestries using shredded print (from the computer printer) as wefts: flat-woven and rya, to create another con TEXT – TEXTure in a weft-faced TEXTile.  These will also consider the interplay of the light across the surface of the weaving and at the same time excite the observer as to the conTEXT of the shredded TEXT.

Words can be strung together to make a fabric of TEXT; words are the fibre of the conTEXT of my work.  What language do we dream in? I dream in fibre.

ASK'