The work began in a heatwave in Monterrey Mexico in April 2003 with the left-over felt from a collaborative project I had worked on the previous year. I had been painting and drawing on paper and making cardboard constructions, but wanted to work with something more tactile and portable.
Over two years a creeping line of feltwork, made of small, incremental pieces, evolved. The line stitched together time, keeping me focused on the next step. of an inner as well as outer journey, for as worn as this archetype may be through overuse, it was the appropriate one.
Each cutting and reorganising of the felt was a mini experiment. Piecing together the dismembered works in new configurations meant suspending the impulse to make meaning, and allowed a larger direction to emerge. Each stitch held together the moment, pulled forward with intention like a determined step, so that the journey didn’t stagnate, or repeat in endless labyrinthine cycles. I pull you forward, says the stitch, so that you don’t pull me back. I pull you forward in this tenuous figuring of the ground, so that you don’t fix on any particular figure, and so that in re-membering, you keep walking, stepping, moving… Even when you don’t know where you are going.
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Feltworks (I) was exhibited at Museum of Brisbane in 2005. It snaked around four walls of the gallery.
Photographs – Rachel Apelt
Medium: Felt, gesso, gouache, polyester thread.
Rachel Apelt 