STITCHES TO SAVE 9 WITH
Fari Bradley
9 MAR-25 APR 2017
In this exhibition, Fari Bradley explores the nuances of language, history and memory. Contemplating either the usefulness or destructive nature of traditionally recited proverbs, truisms, and dictums alongside several new ones for today, Bradley renders them as signifiers, using textile and mixed media.
Stitches to Save 9 With pits the deliberate form of stitching against quickly spoken lines, fleeting inspirations, and ‘quippage’. A proverbial expression, ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ is an incentive: to mend a tear in a cloth now, before it becomes larger and harder to mend. The ‘nine’ refers to the greater number of stitches that will be needed later, if one quick stitch isn’t performed ‘in time’. This and other wise homilies in this body of work are falling out of use – just as hand stitching itself is disappearing.
Using a range of materials, Bradley employs methods and tools that formed part of her upbringing. With a parent who studied and practiced professional dressmaking, offcuts had been Bradley’s childhood playthings. Here, alien-found objects, chanced-upon threads, and remnants serve as inspiration for her work, chiming with the popular reaction for a DIY aesthetic against today’s overwhelmingly disposable culture of low-cost production. Such stitched works, while historically a hobby for the upper classes, also reference a certain Anglo-Saxon work ethic preached at the poor. Referencing this WWII ‘make do and mend’ work ethic, spoken, chanted lessons for life are rendered in traditionally feminine techniques, employing domestic skills that young girls once had to demonstrate in order to become ‘marriage material’.
Decoratively, Bradley’s pieces resist a perspective framed in language, that often posits the idea that human experience is ‘male experience’. No man is an island, for example. Yet while Stitches to Save 9 With is founded on the often sombre messages behind these mechanically memorised sayings, Bradley’s techniques employ layers of satirical significance and testingly playful semantics.
Working mainly as a sound and radio artist, Bradley’s previous works include musical scores rendered in weave, or sculptures combining textiles and electronics. Knitting patterns were a doorway into the algorithmic processes of electronic music, while sewing patterns were parallels to the diagrams used in building electronic circuits and are a visual language Bradley has explored in her arts practice since 2006.
Marcel Proust’s observation, “The remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were” inspired Bradley to visualise memory expressed as an imperfect picture, on which we have all embroidered our own threads, colouring experience as we saw them. Here, the emotion involved in remembering contrasts with the automated way in which, for centuries, past generations have handed down these immutable wisdoms. Such spoken adages were modified to make them easy to remember and repeat, yet lack the vital quality of adaptation, by which all things must survive.
The Mine+ is a brand new platform dedicated to emerging regional talent and international guest artists. It is delighted to host Fari Bradley for the space’s third exhibition.
