5 kent street
henley beach
sa 5022
open: wed to sat 1 - 5
irmina van niele
La Folie, 2009
textile work comprising 3 elements
found plastic shopping bags
hand knitted lace
160 cm x 35 cm each element
Irmina van Niele exhibited in the exhibition at the Jam Factory Resonance 2009.
irmina van niele
artist statement october 2009
La Folie
The broad focus of my interest is on the human experience of belonging and on the universal need for a sense of identity and connectedness. There is a strong autobiographical aspect to my work, which focuses on lived experience and memory in relation to physical and emotional dislocation. La Folie forms part of this ongoing concern with memories of past experience and their elusive but persistent resonance in the present. Working from remembered experiences, I attempt to show what comes through the surface to consciousness: ephemeral fragments that are multiple, layered and complex. This work is inevitably to do with identity, and the impossibility of achieving a clearly defined, undistorted single sense of self.
The process of making this work corresponds to its subject: extreme in its tedium, its repeated frustrations, refusal of smoothness, of cooperation, and its persistent production of pain, resulting in something tenacious and vulnerable, distorted and true, clumsily domestic, yet filled with elusive desire. I have sought to bring out this potential energy, pushing the material’s possibilities to its extremes by knitting its shreds into ladder-like lacy constructions. These processes are at once delicate and decisive - slow, and determined, and full of utmost care, proceeding without damaging threads. There is uncertainty; what if my remembered reality is unrecognised by others? Its denial may lead back to madness - folie - of another time and place, in another language, yet resonant in the present.
Memories are not always benign; they can be persistent, disturbing, nightmarish even. Distorted memories may come to the surface in dreams, in an effort at ordering fragmented elements into cohesive patterns. Such attempts at constructing meaning are, in Freud’s view, a building of illusions that form a protective layer.
These fragile objects are knitted with shredded residual consumption material of no perceived value, unwanted; its material potential overlooked. So these constructions of identity remain fraught with problems; scratchy, distorted and split, their basis is wrong; an unloved, non-solid surrogate material. At the same time it is making the effort possible, as love is the unknown loss, its ambiguous undercurrents reflected in these distorted objects that can never be wearable garments.