Unifying Threads

Te Atamira, Remarkables Park, 12 Hawthorne Drive, Frankton, Queenstown

“Unifying Threads presented by the mothermother collective explores visual and social expressions of patterns of connection, as they support one of their own moving to and connecting with a new community. For Tori Beeche her relocation to Queenstown prompted feelings of being untethered from her new home. Discussing this with the collective, we realised we are tethered through threads of connection that weave patterns through a community.

Art is a medium of experience that represents our perception of the world around us. In Unifying Threads artists from the mothermother collective consider how they portray their experience of the world in their respective art practices. Collectively they have multiple and varied modes of perception through which they filter their experience of the world. Yet, there is always a unifying thread that connects these practitioners in recognisable patterns of understanding.

Threads of narrative, ecology, weaving, cyclical time, seasons, generations, and journeys are found. For the artists in this exhibition perception is triggered by more than mere sensation, perception occurs when there is recognition of a pattern within the sensuous.

Humxns use order to help us make sense of the physical as well as the metaphysical world and have found patterns everywhere from time immemorial. Recognition for the French critic and theorist Charles Baudelaire (b.1821, d.1867) is about capturing the permanent from the transient. That which stands up to flux and change.

It is through understanding the patterns of connection that we create in our environment that we recognise that we are at home in the world. These bonds form patterns of connection that traverse the behavioural, social, political and geographical landscape.

They are the Unifying Threads that hold us to people and place.”

Text via mothermother