BATH, England — Cotton, a fabric imbued with an extended and brutal racialized historical past, kinds a part of the enmeshment of Western European wealth, structure, and artwork with Black histories and cultures. For Diedrick Brackens, these advanced 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 typical dyes, he additionally hand-stains the cotton threads with pigments reminiscent of 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 recommend 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 recommend allegory, or maybe a retelling of a folks 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, reminiscent of 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 paintings as sculpture or set up and inspiring viewers to circumnavigate them. The backs of the works, the place pictures are seen in reverse and solely a few of the components of the ultimate composition bleed by means of, supply a distinct perspective. Within the aforementioned works “at the length of a season” and “prodigal,” for example, the animals could be seen from the again, whereas the human figures can’t — reasonably, 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 also 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 various 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 had been in style among the many upper-middle lessons in the course of the peak of British colonial growth and the slave commerce. Brackens’s silhouetted figures, alternatively, are rougher-edged, bigger, and full-body, claiming possession of a story usually unseen in depictions of Georgian Britain. Taken along with his tapestries, Brackens’s work signifies the myriad methods by 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 (picture 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 Avenue, Bathwick, Bathtub, United Kingdom) by means of Could 26. The exhibition is curated by Layla Gatens and Chris Stephens.
