dimensions variable
2025
wood, gesso, iron oxide, acrylic, cotton workcoats, digitally printed linen
Installed at Layer House, Kranj, for BIEN 2025.
When Slovenia was under French occupation, Leopold Layer is said to have printed counterfeit money in the cellar of Layer House. Long after the artist and his press were seized by Napoleon, I made work for the small, vaulted room upstairs where Layer’s students practised painting, layer upon layer. Counterfeiting their brushwork using wooden frames, papermaking processes, and textile dust gathered from hand and machine production processes, my work for BIEN 2025 explored ideas of invisible labour, lost industry, care and value.
Intangible Assets borrows its title from the language of commerce and the decorative paintwork of the walls to unspool Leopold’s dreams. A wooden frame mirrors the dimensions of a painted frame on the wall opposite and is coated with iron oxide, the dust once said to have stained the nearby city of Jesenice. A photograph of the ceiling fresco is digitally printed on linen, the weft of Leopold’s sky pulled from the warp, the linen threads then pulped with the white cotton work coats of conservation. The reconstituted cloth forms a patchwork; a pillow case with a circle of pink textile dust as though the sun has fallen from his sky, and stuffed with dust collected locally in the manufacture of bedding.