pulp_work-afk.doc
curated by María Andreína Escalona De Abreu for Céline Bureau.
pulp
An undefined mass of material, in a wet, soft, shapeless state. See a pile of yarn scraps, shapeless blue fluff, a pile of seaweed used to give shape to a morphing soft sculpture, patches of handwoven fabric for future unidentified graphemes creating with, for and from our natural surroundings. We invite these materials to inhabit the garage as a way to embrace the creative process with all its mistakes, unexpected outcomes, and slow pace.
_work
An open invitation to continue developing a large artistic and research practice encompassing paperwork, artworks, craftwork, slow_work, and work_work. The pieces in the space result from discarded paperwork and string from past projects, from hiking in nature and weaving at the beach, from conversations in vernissages and experimenting in the garage, from a thesis in Vienna and many hours on the loom; they are new surfaces to continue to work; embodying the lived tension between making artwork and working in the arts. As cultural workers, we see the term holding space for all forms of labour related to creation and that sustaining such creation is to sustain good relations to ourselves, to each other, and to nature.
-afk.doc
A time and space dedicated for the weaver to work away-from-keyboard. A nod to a previous site-specific installation and performance, we weave canvases for soft sculptures and make paper out of scraps. The desk is now a swinging branch loom and the keyboard a shuttle of thread, the institution and fast-paced environment is now a garage — its corners, walls, ceiling, lamps, spiral staircase, and floors become a playground, a learning and teaching opportunity to materialize and make visible the labour behind art-making and exhibition-making.
What are the material traces of our labour? As artists, curators, art administrators, educators, writers, papermakers, weavers, and laborers we collaborate to inhabit Céline Bureau with work-in-progress, artworks, gestures, our time and more labour. As a continuation of the exhibition paper_work.doc presented at the FOFA Gallery this summer, which brought together artists working at the intersection of papermaking, sustainability, relational practices, and labour, we (re)think and expose our pulp, our work and our docs.