‘Totems of Hope’ was funded by an Arts Council England ‘Developing your Creative Practice’ award in 2021. An installation of seven 1m x 1.5m textile banners. They were on display at the Prittlewell Priory Museum throughout 2023 and currently installed at ‘All is Joy’ film production studios Soho.
Sacred banners have long been used as a symbolic tool to communicate the spiritual realm and to celebrate revival and regeneration. These symbolise a resurrection of the creative spirit; they are ‘guardians’, a force for hope and unity in an increasingly fractured world.
OPEN IMAGE IN NEW TAB TO VIEW FULL SIZE
The imagery evolved from an analogue collage series evoking the ‘Sacred Feminine’; images of transformation and empowerment as hybrid ‘totems’. Sources include medieval religious paintings and icons, Tudor/Baroque era royal portraiture, and myriad sculptural and symbolic/natural forms.
The banners incorporate sumptuous velvet and damask fabrics, hand-constructed with all their human imperfections alongside the precision of cutting-edge digital technologies; a fusion of tradition and the contemporary. Embroidered motifs, reminiscent of the ecclesiastical, are partly deconstructed by my interventions with the machinery.
I have also created a ‘sister’ series of ‘Cosmic Sea Goddesses’, or Sirens, which may well be developed into a sequel banner installation. The archetypal Siren evolved from part bird-woman into the mermaid and represents a powerful and assertive female sexuality and therefore perceived to assert a dangerous allure. The Siren is a hybrid, in contemporary culture it has come to represent transformative potential; as with the Totems of Hope above, these images are composite analogue collages referencing both modern and classical mythologies, synthesizing ancient Western and Eastern cultural traditions as contemporary ‘mash-ups’.
