Jeorja Duffy

studio b

critique

Jeorja Duffy, affection, 2024, installation, textile, AUT Studio, Auckland.

keywords (ongoing)

A collection of keywords sourced from readings, audio, documentaries and conversations.

material library (ongoing)

A collection of cloths I am using to create my forms. I intend for this exercise to document my encounter with the materials, noting relevant information regarding the material’s history, name, smell, texture, etc. This will help research affect, encounter, material language, and duration. Just Jeans Soft, elastic. Adrift Sheer, blue, green, white, illustrative, crisp, thin, stiff, low thread count. more M Stretchy, soft, blue and gold, comforting, fun. unnamed Stiff, thin, small fallout, crisp, aged. Louvre Fallout, soft, loopy. unnamed Smooth. unnamed Rough, thick.

entry two: modification

As an investigation into space and the transformation of the context for my forms, I explored installing in locations in my home that reflected the memories belonging to my mum’s clothing. Modification, c. 1500, in philosophy, “determination by a mode or quality,” from French modification (14c.) and directly from Latin modificationem (nominative modificatio) “a measuring,” noun of action from past-participle stem of modificare (see modify). Sense of “a result of a variation or alteration” is from 1660s. Meaning “act or process of altering in character, form, or function” is from 1774. Sourced Etymology; https://www.etymonline.com/word/modification#etymonline_v_32324.

keyword mapping

Great discussion with Jenna this afternoon. Template that can be transferred to spaces, tackling space politically with my forms presenting bodies. Body to body to body. As a method to keep track of keywords necessary to my project I opted to map it out on my studio wall. After diagraming, I have found this method supports the pace of my thinking and making. Keywords such as materialism, simultaneously, and embodiment have been prevalent in contexts in my current research. By creating my geographical boundary, I have found it helps generate new varieties of research questions and frameworks. A quick legend…

artist research: Pip Culbert – Fragile Skeletons

English artist Pip Culbert practised with textile objects, deconstructing the forms to the seams. Culbert recontextualised the objects into line drawings with a minimalist thought: less is more. Her work left for the encounter of the space between the lines, allowing audiences to formulate their perception of the object.  Culbert’s practice is excellent in context to my investigation into textile clothing and deconstructing to the seams in the exploration of fibrous bodies and connections. Her forms become skeletons of the textile object, providing agency to the relationship between the body and textile/fibres. For my project, I can relate Culbert’s engagement…

entry one: transferring my emotions

29/04/24: Today, I use materials close to home, such as my mum’s clothing. I feel hesitant to cut my mum’s clothing. There are items in her bag that I recognise from my childhood, now old and tattered, that she willingly gave me to use. There is so much memory and history held in these items that I will simply deconstruct; it’s saddening; however, this is an emotion I am willing to transmit. As Louise Bourgeois said, my feelings are too big for me, too intense. It is as if I am mourning my childhood through my mum and her clothing. The smell, the…

artist research: Louise Bourgeois – Transferring Emotions

Louise Bourgeois was a French-American sculptor known for her large-scale sculptures and installation art. She focused on her experiences of domesticity and the family, exploring her emotions that transferred into sculptures. Her practice was honest and raw, and she often became a storyteller by being truthful to her emotive experience, the embodiment of her experiences. “The purpose of the pieces is to express the emotions. My emotions are inappropriate for my size. My emotions are my demons.” Bourgeois reads emotions through their intensity, her sculptures as an output of her life and childhood frustrations.  The documentary short film, A Prisoner of…

artist research: Magdalena Abakanowicz – Fibrous Bodies

Magdalena Abakanowicz was a Polish sculptor who explored art as a state of being through large-scale textile sculptures. Her work, coined as “The Abakans”, were large bodily forms woven as cocoons. Abakanowicz treated her work as her language to express the human relationship to the environment, memory, history and connection themes. She approached her medium of textile and fibres with an exciting view, as “we are all fibrous structures” (03:55) exploring the body and fibre in the context of the world and human experience. When installed, she created her forms to create an environment where they collaborated to foster an emotive…

artist research: Chiharu Shiota – Presence of Absence

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese artist focused on contexts of craft, installation and presence. The memory of space and the body influence her practice, exploring the themes of life, death, and the soul through her vast installations. From a painter to a performance artist, Shiota researched her position as a travelling artist, reflecting on her experience of losing touch with her home country, Japan. She explored the displacement of the human body to the environment. Shiota’s installations expand space, immersing the audience in a duration of encounters and acknowledging memories belonging to the site.  Her use of string and colour…

artist research: Anni Albers – Listening

Anni Albers was a German textile artist who crafted with weaving. As an art educator, Albers’ was knowledgeable about textile processes and methods. Anni explored the history of the process as a weaver in understanding recurring motifs pictorially and weaving techniques. Her methodology reflects nature; Alber speaks to nature as a mystery. Alber’s practice has a heavy presence of mystery, an ongoing investigation of weaving. “Consciousness is necessary to order, an order that should not be instantly readable. Mystery is what draws us to art.”(17:45) The process leads to art, and it is essential to understand the pattern of the making…

artist research: Gego – The Lines of a Life

Gego was a German-Venezualan artist with a studied background in architecture. Her work investigated lines and points of connection drawn towards constellations. She often visited the beach and observed the stars, intrigued by the human experience of drawing and reading in lines. Gego’s work reflected these experiences when creating her forms. With her architectural background, she found the potential to play with an artist’s practice. She started experimenting with technique and colour through watercolour painting of figurative forms towards geometric forms. Gego worked with grids, a common form used amongst the artists I have established relations to my project, Asawa,…

artist research: Eva Hesse – Expanded Expansion

The pioneering sculptor Eva Hesse worked with Minimalism while in its male-dominated period. Her work experimented with materials and tested the potential of industrial elements, such as rubber, metal, latex, and rope. She was a crucial figure in the formation of Post-modernism, assisting in the soft sculptural approach by experimenting with the abilities and qualities of materials. Her work, Expanded Expansion, is an expansive wall piece of latex draped like a curtain. Hesse had no concern for the lifespan of her work; through using latex, she was aware that the material would not hold the same physical properties as the original throughout…

artist research: Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa was a Japanese-American artist whose practice indulged in mark-making and treating drawing as a tool of perception. Asawa’s making was influenced by patterns of nature, often spending time viewing nature as an activation for her drawings. Her practice involved meticulous experimentation, considering mathematics, design, and architecture through in-depth research on the transfer between 2D and 3D. With this ongoing study, Asawa created her visual language that collapsed visceral and intellectual, making intricate forms of mathematical thinking to form fetal, bodily forms.  To consider the treatment of the visual language of my project, the forms in my work, adriftjustjeansmoremlouvre, sit relaxed…

artist research: Sheila Hicks – Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column

Sheila Hicks is a textile artist working with many craft methods from around the world to inform her exploration of form, colour, and structure. Hicks combines traditional, cultural textile making and weaving, establishing an expanded geographical boundary. Her interview with MoMa shares her story and fascination with textiles and fibres about her work, Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column, exhibited in MoMa in 2019. Her use of the word breathing in her work Blue Letter drew my initial interest. The endearment gives life to her textiles in acknowledging the properties present in the material that work together to create the structure, the gestalt. Hicks refers…

artist research: Yoko Ono – Cut Piece

Yoko Ono’s, Cut Piece was a performance in which Yoko sat on a stage and invited the audience to cut away her clothes. This work explores the collapsing of the neutral relationship between art and the audience. Yoko references the female body figure as a neutral subject in art. Together, Yoko’s performance highlights the reciprocal exchange between audience and art and the importance of being aware of the exchange in preserving the perception of the art experience. This work is relevant to my project towards the figure of the female body. Reflecting on my project, I use materials with feminine…