Earth's Shield in Collection of tapestries, Ildikó Dobrányi Foundation, Budapest
My artistic research deals with nature, in particular leaves, barks, but above all seeds of plants, pods that give me great fascination and reason for which I entitle my works Shell, the English equivalent for the Italian “conchiglia”, conch.
Shell, itsends back to me innumerable meanings centralized on the linguistic valence of covering, when shapes shut themselves up: carapace, cuirass, frame, carcass, skeleton, projectile, appearance, scale.
Small and sinuous shapes assuring the dimensional mobility from the tree and their vital capacity of shutting themselves for long till the moment they mysteriously wake up: the seeds are like “sleeper beauties”.
Subsequently I present my art works in a dimensional installation as they were a fragment of a galaxy: macrocosm and microcosm together; disseminations, sowing of fragile bodies aggregated magnetically and arranged in constellations or in an unknown writing.
I have always considered the use of the vertical loom similar to the process of growth of a plant: slow, from the low to the high, in all directions.
The shapes are created organically from their internal side.
Actually the vertical loom and the tapestry art are tools allowing me to work the vegetal fibers from their frame to the three-dimensionality.
In a creative process every phase of elaboration and realization of work must necessarily be executed from the same person in every fold of the woven.
Every detail, fold, fissure is its intimate expression and a sort of personal dialogue between the artist and the matter: every accident or incidental event, during the weaving, could become a process of interior identification.
As Maurice Merleau-Ponty said: «Since the things and my body are made of the same material, you need that the vision takes place someway in them».
In the case of the detail selected from the classical Brussels tapestry, I have associated a series of themes recurrent in my research to that part of ground under the goat/Capricorn, considering the spots after Leonardo da Vinci’s idea about the interpretation of ambiguous designs to assess an individual's personality, idea which was later systematized by Hermann Rorschach in the projective psychological inkblot test.
First, the image of Mother Earth, and second, that part of ground under the Capricorn related to the beginning of winter solstice: a period in which the vegetation appears nearly without life, bare and silent nature with extinguished colours, dominated from cold and ice; a phase of the seed hidden under ground and snow while it waits for giving its yields in a far maturity, in the summer solstice; metaphor of the process of the eternal and alternate growth and reduction of the cosmos change, of the opposites as soft/hard, warm/cold, young/old.
At the same time Bacchus/Dionysus, the “twice-born”, represented the fecundating energy; this concept is extended to the Nymphs to which he was entrusted and by Zeus rewarded, placing them as the star cluster Hyades, sisterhood bringing rain.
Also the image of Capricorn is related to the animals with a hard skin like a cuirass, the crocodile: a smooth and armoured skin with cornea formations, “scuta”, like shields on which are distributed sensory organs.
The cult of Semele probably of Thracian-Phrygian origins is connected to a ctonia, an underground divinity, a personification of seismic or volcanic forces.
According to the religious beliefs of Maya’s Civilization the ground rests on a huge crocodile in water and when it moves itself, earthquakes burst out on the earth.
That ambiguous design in the old Brussels tapestry evokes me an ancestral animal, and tragic present events.
Shell, itsends back to me innumerable meanings centralized on the linguistic valence of covering, when shapes shut themselves up: carapace, cuirass, frame, carcass, skeleton, projectile, appearance, scale.
Small and sinuous shapes assuring the dimensional mobility from the tree and their vital capacity of shutting themselves for long till the moment they mysteriously wake up: the seeds are like “sleeper beauties”.
Subsequently I present my art works in a dimensional installation as they were a fragment of a galaxy: macrocosm and microcosm together; disseminations, sowing of fragile bodies aggregated magnetically and arranged in constellations or in an unknown writing.
I have always considered the use of the vertical loom similar to the process of growth of a plant: slow, from the low to the high, in all directions.
The shapes are created organically from their internal side.
Actually the vertical loom and the tapestry art are tools allowing me to work the vegetal fibers from their frame to the three-dimensionality.
In a creative process every phase of elaboration and realization of work must necessarily be executed from the same person in every fold of the woven.
Every detail, fold, fissure is its intimate expression and a sort of personal dialogue between the artist and the matter: every accident or incidental event, during the weaving, could become a process of interior identification.
As Maurice Merleau-Ponty said: «Since the things and my body are made of the same material, you need that the vision takes place someway in them».
In the case of the detail selected from the classical Brussels tapestry, I have associated a series of themes recurrent in my research to that part of ground under the goat/Capricorn, considering the spots after Leonardo da Vinci’s idea about the interpretation of ambiguous designs to assess an individual's personality, idea which was later systematized by Hermann Rorschach in the projective psychological inkblot test.
First, the image of Mother Earth, and second, that part of ground under the Capricorn related to the beginning of winter solstice: a period in which the vegetation appears nearly without life, bare and silent nature with extinguished colours, dominated from cold and ice; a phase of the seed hidden under ground and snow while it waits for giving its yields in a far maturity, in the summer solstice; metaphor of the process of the eternal and alternate growth and reduction of the cosmos change, of the opposites as soft/hard, warm/cold, young/old.
At the same time Bacchus/Dionysus, the “twice-born”, represented the fecundating energy; this concept is extended to the Nymphs to which he was entrusted and by Zeus rewarded, placing them as the star cluster Hyades, sisterhood bringing rain.
Also the image of Capricorn is related to the animals with a hard skin like a cuirass, the crocodile: a smooth and armoured skin with cornea formations, “scuta”, like shields on which are distributed sensory organs.
The cult of Semele probably of Thracian-Phrygian origins is connected to a ctonia, an underground divinity, a personification of seismic or volcanic forces.
According to the religious beliefs of Maya’s Civilization the ground rests on a huge crocodile in water and when it moves itself, earthquakes burst out on the earth.
That ambiguous design in the old Brussels tapestry evokes me an ancestral animal, and tragic present events.