Launching softly on the spring equinox 2024, To Impermanent Collections and Scattered Acquisitions at Kunstverein Aughrim was a brief coming together of distinct material concerns from unfolding bodies of work dealing with the changing fates of the global textiles and forestry industries. Handmade paper blended the pulped cotton workcoats of conservation with fallen leaves and textile waste, the woodland dyes of a silk pojagi faded in a window frame, whilst the trimmings and static built up in the course of its making held silk confetti to a mirror, gradually falling to floor over the course of the show. The exhibition offered an insight into evolving works and processes in the development of the solo shows, We are collecting today, for tomorrow, a collaboration with CIMO Centre for Research of Fashion and Clothing, Zagreb, and The Visitors at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny.
A small team of skilled needleworkers was enlisted to form a ‘workforce’ to assist in the development of work for the exhibition at Ethnographic Museum Zagreb. Meeting weekly as Home Industries during a series of paid embroidery shifts at a table in Kunstverein Aughrim, each worker embroidered linen with the unpicked threads of souvenir tablecloths. Next to them, the unpicked threads of another tablecloth were reconfigured as a tassled fringe attached to the wooden underside and kissing the granite face of Forerunner’s Granite Leap, the permanent artwork at the heart of the space. The ethnic motifs the souvenir textile hoped to preserve now reduced to a gradient of colour – the erasure echoing the fall of Croatia’s industrial textiles industry. Mismanagement, bankruptcy, and speculation over property development for tourism replaced previous narratives of a thriving industry and the emancipation of a female workforce ‘made of granite’. A playful first iteration of these tassled fringes, the reconfigured table linen embodies the socialist ‘double burden’ of workers who navigated the factory floor and kitchen table.
‘Working with found, salvaged or scavenged materials, MacLeman sources the ‘remains of the remains’; a discarded nursing uniform from a second hand shop in Zabok, a patch of grass collected from where Kamensko workers held their hunger strike, woodchips gathered from felled ash trees in the grounds of Merlin Park University Hospital. Every one of her core components is a bi-product of its tangled socio-historical context, an acknowledgement of the state of flux from which it originated. Through the application of care and labour, attention and skill, MacLeman carries that context through a process of material transformation, and in doing so, reclaims its potential to create new meaning. From a tassel fringe made from the threads of an unpicked souvenir tablecloth, to a pattern of silk slivers that fall and fade in the sunlight, To Impermanent Collections and Scattered Acquisitions is a celebration of knowledge-in-the-making’. (Kunstverein Aughrim)
Photographs by Freddie Greenall courtesy of Kunstverein Aughrim and courtesy of the artist.