Soft Cartographies

Soft Cartographies brings together textile-based works by Renata Minoldo, Lili Süper and Ella Yolande, curated by Aisling Ward. About From the loom to the algorithm, the exhibition explores textiles as carriers of code and witnesses to shifting landscapes. Through weaving, felting, knitting and programming, the artists blend the digital and organic to map ecological change, and our relationships to it. The works demonstrate how textile techniques are sophisticated forms of encoding that require bodily presence, sensory attention and care. In doing so, the artists show us what fabric can hold that data alone cannot: the weight of water, the chemical signature of soil, ancestral knowledge and the duration of attention it takes to watch a place transform. Lili Süper’s works spin digital images back into physical matter. With each stitch representing a pixel, she translates video stills of satellite imagery and planetary mapping into knitted surfaces. Using open-source data from the European Copernicus Earth observation programme, the images show Earth’s surface marked by human influence: a Brazilian dam, a flood in Greece, the dried-up lakebed of Chew Bahir in Ethiopia, and the Rocky Mountains scorching with heat. Ella Yolande’s work draws on Susan Schuppli’s notion of material witness: the idea that matter carries trace evidence of past ecological events. She asks how these traces might be held in cloth, through natural dyeing and environmental alteration. Weaving together pigments, field notes and coordinates from sites on Dartmoor, her hand-dyed, digitally knitted garments become an alternative map, one that questions what is valued as data. In Thinking with Lichens: Attending to Trace , 3D scans show textile garments melded into the environments around them, so that fabric and landscape begin to blur. Renata Minoldo delves into more-than-human desire by queering traditional materials and methods of making, recognising moisture, natural fibres, botanical pigments and time as collaborators. Her four-part frame loom is a relational sculpture: its randomly knitted nets are collectively embroidered by visitors throughout the exhibition. Lacking conventional warp and weft, the loom is a soft container for sensory interaction, allowing participants to weave in any direction and establish nonverbal forms of communication - new codes. Two transitional pieces, neither fully felted nor woven but a hybrid membrane of both, are suspended so that both sides can be seen. Their holes and needle marks on felted, distorted fabric invite visitors to peek through. Opening Times: 12pm - 6pm — Event Programme: Friday 20th November, 6pm - 9pm - Private View Sunday 22nd November, 2-3pm - In Conversation with Renata Minoldo, Lili Süper, Ella Yolande & Aisling Ward Saturday 28th November, 11am-1pm - Weaving together we ripple: A workshop with Renata Minoldo In this workshop you are invited to explore collaborative tapestry weaving as a soft, analog, code-making tool. Using reclaimed wool for drawing, the invitation is to explore both sides of the flexible nets within the metal frame loom to create a collective piece that aims to weave a multiplicity of gestures, voices and ideas. -- Bios: Renata Minoldo is an artist, botanical dyer and facilitator. Interested in relationships between vibrational ecologies, somatic memory and experiences of reciprocal care and intimacy, she works across expanded sculpture, relational objects and social engagement, where she builds temporary spaces for collective thinkering. Her practice, anchored in slow textile crafts and soft technologies, is informed by material feminisms and threads non-verbal communication with embodied knowledge and intuitive learning/unlearning. Lili Süper is a multimedia artist working across textile, installation, video and performance. Her practice examines the objectifying gaze and the technological apparatuses that intensify it: what kind of look does a machine cast on a body, and how does that look turn a body into an object? In her performance work she turns this question on her own body; in her textile works she turns it on the body of the Earth. Satellites survey the planet through metal eyes, measuring heat, salt, water and elevation from a god’s-eye view. Lili translates these measurements into knitted surfaces that give the data a body again, with weight, softness and skin. Her work is informed by new materialism and feminist posthumanism. Ella Yolande is a visual artist working across video, sculpture & textiles, focusing on the intersection of art and ecology. She draws on artistic fieldwork practices to create video installations, site specific textiles & plant infused therapeutic garments. Her work is informed by plant properties, queer ecologies, alternative mapping processes, colonial botanical histories & methods of resilience. Approaching the land as animate, lively and full of memory, Ella considers what might be ‘read’ and understood from the landscape and other organisms. Working with natural dyes, ecological research and local histories, she is interested in how plant traces might act as a form of record and how matter has resonance through time. Aisling Ward is a curator and artist based between London and Derbyshire, investigating labour histories and collective resistance through archival materials, movement, and film. Her curatorial research explores the intersection of textiles, technology and social practice, examining how weaving and programming share spatial logics that resist binary thinking. Aisling has worked in collaboration with organisations including CVAN East/West Midlands, British Ceramics Biennial, Deptford X, University of the Arts London, LUX, QUAD Gallery x FORMAT, and Derbyshire Makes. Read more Toggle Digital Audio / Sound Film / Video Performance / Live Art Crafts Multi-disciplinary Installation