BATH, England — Cotton, a cloth imbued with a protracted and brutal racialized historical past, varieties a part of the enmeshment of Western European wealth, structure, and artwork with Black histories and cultures. For Diedrick Brackens, these complicated associations type the muse for his large-scale tapestry works exploring African American identification, proven in the UK for the primary time on the Holburne Museum.
Brackens drew upon a collage of strategies, starting from European tapestry to West African weaving and quilting traditions from the American South, to make the 4 items on view. Alongside standard dyes, he additionally hand-stains the cotton threads with pigments equivalent to wine or tea. There’s a homey high quality to those tapestries’ roughness of the weave and hand-tied tassels; they resemble objects made for each ornament and sensible use from supplies accessible readily available. Some items have been woven in sections and stitched collectively, with pictorial components aligning imperfectly throughout the divides. There are free threads in locations, contributing to a barely unfinished high quality that means incomplete narratives, historic gaps, and ongoing mythologies.
In “at the length of a season: blood ghost” (2024), hanging crimson threads counsel blood dripping from a ghostly human physique interwoven into the picture of a sacrificial deer trussed and carried on a pole by two silhouetted human figures. The pared-down symbols of the work counsel allegory, or maybe a retelling of a people story, however the particulars stay opaque and open to interpretation. In “prodigal” (2023), a determine lifts a knife above a fats pig as a blood-red solar rises or units behind them, combining an allusion to the biblical story of the Prodigal Son with an environment of violence and uncertainty.
Diedrick Brackens, “prodigal” (2023), cotton and acrylic yarn
In earlier exhibitions, equivalent to these at Jack Shainman Gallery or the Sharjah Biennial, Brackens’s tapestries have predominantly been held on the wall. On the Holburne, nonetheless, the items are suspended from picket frames positioned at angles within the middle of the neoclassical Ballroom Gallery, positioning the art work as sculpture or set up and inspiring viewers to circumnavigate them. The backs of the works, the place photos are seen in reverse and solely among the components of the ultimate composition bleed by means of, supply a unique perspective. Within the aforementioned works “at the length of a season” and “prodigal,” as an illustration, the animals may be seen from the again, whereas the human figures can’t — fairly, they emerge like ghostly apparitions as one comes across the entrance.
The simplicity of the picket frames contrasts sharply with the ornateness of the grand room, which can be used to show 18th-century gilt-framed work and elaborate ornamental objects. On this context, Brackens’s weavings obliquely remind guests of the Holburne Museum’s foundational hyperlinks with Caribbean plantations and the slave commerce. Right here, Brackens’s monochrome figures additionally relate to the numerous Eighth-century silhouette portraits within the museum’s assortment. Exactly lower from black paper or painted on glass, these small works capturing a likeness from the shoulders up have been well-liked among the many upper-middle courses through the peak of British colonial enlargement and the slave commerce. Brackens’s silhouetted figures, then again, are rougher-edged, bigger, and full-body, claiming possession of a story typically unseen in depictions of Georgian Britain. Taken along with his tapestries, Brackens’s work signifies the myriad methods through which these histories are knitted collectively throughout continents and cultures. And of their multitivocal ambiguity, they provide the potential to weave new and untold narratives.
Set up view of Diedrick Brackens, “at the length of a season: blood ghost” (2024), cotton and acrylic yarn
Set up view of Diedrick Brackens: Woven Tales on the Holburne Museum (photograph Anna Souter/Hyperallergic)
Diedrick Brackens, “if you have ghosts” (2024), cotton and acrylic yarn
Diedrick Brackens: Woven Tales continues on the Holburne Museum (Nice Pulteney Road, Bathwick, Bathtub, United Kingdom) by means of Might 26. The exhibition is curated by Layla Gatens and Chris Stephens.
