Patterns of existence

Opens Thursday 12 November at 6pm. All welcome.
Exhibition runs until Saturday 21 November
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday 9.30am to 5.00pm

Blending screen printing and patterned, hand-woven textiles, emerging artist Beatrice Thompson depicts the rhythms and routines of urban settings in her exhibition Patterns of Existence, showing at the Megalo Print Studio + Gallery from Thursday 12 to Saturday 21 November. Thompson captures fleeting moments of everyday life on film and then uses digital processes to simplify the images to graphic black and white. These are then transferred onto her weavings via screen printing, the stark, urban scenes printed in solid black onto delicately patterned hand woven surfaces.

In some works Thomson has screen-printed her images onto loose warp threads that she later weaves on her loom.  The printed warp threads shift during the weaving process, slightly distorting the forms and disturbing the regularity of the patterned weave structures.

In other works, Thompson screen prints her images directly onto the hand-woven cloth, allowing the urban scenes to hover over their patterned background.

Thompson states “My interest lies in commenting on the mundane, repetitious nature of our daily lives and how our daily actions become habitual and ritualistic while trapped within the web of life and death.  The touch of light on the film negative was used to capture fleeting vignettes of life; these threads of light form our patterns of existence.”

Image: Beatrice Thompson, Urban Trekker, 2009, woven textile with screen printed warp.