Announcing Mark Corfield-Moore’s first Solo Exhibition in Spain

OTHER FOLLIES AND PICNICS
MARK CORFIELD-MOORE

Opening Reception: Tuesday, June 21, 6-9pm
SENECA MAIN GALLERY, 9-11, Barcelona, 08006

We can gladly announce that Alzueta Gallery is hosting Mark Corflied-Moore´s first Solo Exhibition in Spain “Other Follies and Picnics”.

Mark Corfield-Moore is a painter whose practice holds woven textiles at its core. The conception of fabrics as nomadic objects is fundamental to his work. Investigating the historic use of textiles in the production of rugs and tents, items that are portable and attached to no specific location, his understanding of fabrics and his practice at large is rooted in this sense of transience. His work feeds from his Thai and British heritage as well as from his experience with the diaspora from the rural area of Dorset, England. Those influences can be seen in how he combines a traditional Thai weaving technique known as Ikat, with the depiction of the traditional English follies.

The exhibition features a new body of works which utilize the Ikat weaving technique that Corfield-Moore learnt in Northern Thailand. In place of traditional binding and dyeing, he paints directly onto the warp threads before winding them on the loom and then hand weaving. These woven paintings are then stretched and presented on canvases. Ikat is distinctive due to its glitchy or blurry aesthetic, what he calls a ‘fizzy heat’. The artist likens this instability to the subject of memories, both personal memory and collective history, and our constantly evolving relationship to the past.

“Other Follies and Picnics” draws upon childhood picnics that the artist and his family had at the historic estate of Stourhead in England through his own renditions of the actual follies featured in these gardens. Often mimicking classical temples, follies are fantastical architectural buildings designed for amusement and pleasure. Through his depictions, Corfield-Moore undermines a more straight forward reading of these buildings by including the names of traditional Thai dishes, the ones that he and his family would have eaten during their visits. The strength of these works lies in their ambiguity and playful sense of humor, where both the societal and the personal, the historic and the mundane are simultaneously combined.

The medium of textiles is one that is malleable and reworkable. Historically used for tents or rugs, its ability to claim space is what interests Corfield-Moore, and he draws parallels between this use of space and the act of setting up for a picnic. The thresholds between public and private, historical and personal, and Western and Thai are fertile spaces that the artist explores, while the act of weaving becomes a meditation on the idiosyncrasies of past events and experiences.

The fourteen artworks will be exhibited until 29th July in the Alzueta Gallery main space in Barcelona, in Seneca street 9-11.