Bath, England – cotton, history is a material with a long and wild race. Western European wealth, architecture and art has histories and black cultures. For Diedrick Brackens, these complex associations make up its large-scale tapestry foundation that explores African American identity in the UK for the first time in the Holburn Museum.
Brackens drawed on a collage of techniques, from the European carpet to echo western Africa and southern American traditions to visible Americans. Conventionally with colorants, cotton wires also has stains with pigments like wine or tea. There is a high quality quality for these percentage and manually-related rounds; They resemble objects made for the decoration and practical uses of available materials. Some pieces have been woven in sections and connected together with pictorial elements that align imperfects in parts. There are loose threads in places, incomplete narratives, without the end of the quality of historical gaps and continuous mythologies.
“In the duration of the season” (2024), hanging red threads is dripping from a ghost human body to the image of a passionate deer. The worked symbols of the work suggest allegory, or perhaps reuse of a folkloric story, but the details are opaque and are open for interpretation. The “prodigal” (2023) raises a knife above a greased pig, raising red blood, raising red blood, combining the biblical story of the Prodigal, the atmosphere of violence and uncertainty.
In previous exhibitions, such as Jack Shainman Gallery or Sharjah Biennial, Brackens’s tapias hanged on the wall. In Holland, however, the pieces interrupt the wooden frames placed in the angles, in the middle of the neoclassical hall gallery, placing works of art as a sculpture or as a facility and the audience to do the circlege. The backs of the work, where images are seen in reverse and some elements of the latest composition make blood bleeding, they offer another approach. In the aforementioned work “length” and “pronto”, for example, the animals can be seen from the back, human images cannot be easily emerging as a juicy appearance.
The simplicity of wooden frames significantly against the decoration of the large room, that is, XVIII. It is used to cultivate the 19th-century friction paintings and decorative objects. In this context, Brackens hunters reminiscent of visitors to the Link Foundation of the Holburn Museum with Caribbean plantations and slave trade. Here, Brackens’s monochrome figures in the museum’s collection 8. They relate to many silhouettes of the 16th century. In fact, cut from a black paper or painted glass, these small work similar to the shoulders were very popular among the higher classes, during the British colonial expansion and slave trade. Brackens figures, on the other hand, are harder body, larger and whole body, claiming the property of a non-seen narrative in Georgia’s British representations. Taken with its tapestries, Brackens’s work represents these histories in continents and cultures. And they offer the opportunity to weave new narratives and inappropriate narratives.
DIEDICK BRACKENS: Percentage stories It continues in the Holburn Museum (great pulteney street, bathroom, bath, UK) until May 26th. The exhibition heals Layla Gatens and Chris Stephens.
