Circadian is both a celebration of the pace of life in
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Circadian
AMY ASH, CURATOR
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contemporary art.
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spend time engaging with the world around them through
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and what it is for a viewer to make time, take time, and
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This collection of work positions itself at the intersection New Brunswick, engaged in time-intensive processes;
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we are fully present in ourselves and our surroundings. of what it means to be an artist living and working in
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New Brunswick and the awakening that transpires when
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Cover image: Janice Wright Cheney, printed cloth detail, 2019
AX, the Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex
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Circadian
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Preface
The Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation is proud to have awarded a 2019 Sheila Grant to AX, the Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex, in support of their initiatives in the presentation of contemporary art exhibitions and curatorial practice. These highly competitive grants are dedicated to supporting the growth of organizational capacity in New Brunswick-based visual arts organizations. An independent jury selected AX as one of five organizations that demonstrate a commitment to excellence and growth in professional practice. Under the skillful direction of curator Amy Ash, eight New Brunswick artists have been selected to participate in a thought-provoking exhibition, Circadian. These artists take an 2 . . .
unhurried approach to art making and create work that challenges and delights. Circadian is an invitation to viewers to slow down and let wonder and curiosity reign. Through this project, AX has deepened its professional practice in the art of exhibition. Congratulations to the board of directors on their first publication — A X’s dedication to growth and development holds great promise for its future. KATHRYN McCARROLL Executive Director Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation
Foreword
It is with pleasure that AX, the Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex, welcomes New Brunswick artists Jim Boyd, Janice Wright Cheney, Jud Crandall, Tara Francis, Emilie Grace Lavoie, Alana Morouney, Karen Stentaford, and Anna Torma to the AX Gallery. Circadian, curated by Amy Ash, touches on rhythm and time, asking viewers to pause, consider, and savour not only the works before us, but what has gone into their creation. On behalf of the AX Gallery and Board of Directors, I wish to thank the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation for their generous support of the Circadian exhibition and catalogue. In addition, thanks are extended to the generous volunteers who give so much of their time to our charitable organization — we acknowledge and appreciate your selfless dedication. Thanks also to Amy Ash for the time, thought, and care she took with this project, visiting artists’ studios across the province, curating the Circadian exhibition, and preparing the catalogue. Our final and most heartfelt gratitude goes to the participating artists: thank you for helping us to quiet our pace and deliberately engage with what you have created and shared. JANE SIMPSON Executive and Artistic Director AX, the Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex
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Circadian: Making Time AMY ASH, Curator Having relocated to New Brunswick after a few years spent in the large urban centre of London, UK, I’ve become captivated by the pace and quality of life in this province. As the world gets busier, we hold space for slowness here, to revel in the seasons and the natural world around us. With this in mind, I set out to observe the practices of contemporary artists, in New Brunswick, whose work engages with the idea of deceleration through both process and outcome. This exhibition, like the snapshots within these pages, provides evidence of time visiting with artists, listening and learning. Circadian proposes a discussion about time: how we choose to pace, push, or manipulate it and, therefore, ourselves. This exhibition, featuring eight contemporary New Brunswick artists, opens a conversation about pace of life in our province while looking to the natural world for temporal balance. Working through a diverse range of process-rich media, these artists extend an offering of ideas related to time, place, and the value of slowing down to reconnect with the world around us. By slowing down, we can inhabit the present and participate in the passage of time rather than falling victim to its inevitable flux. These fast-paced times have brought rise to many “slow” movements that are rooted in mindfulness. The notion of slow art gained traction in the art world after a study famously published findings that viewers, on average, spend only seventeen seconds observing a work of art.1 That kernel of data — 17 seconds of observation — formed the catalyst for the slow art movement and also defined its parameters and goals: focusing on the viewer’s gaze rather than the artist’s work or production methods. As such, while slow food and slow fashion focus on the agency of both the consumer and the maker, 1 Smith, Jeffrey K. and Lisa F. Smith, “Spending Time on Art.” Empirical Studies of the Arts, 19 no. 2 (2001) 229-236, https://doi.org/10.2190/5MQM-59JH-X21R-JN5J
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the roots of the slow art movement are predominantly wrapped up in the viewer experience. Arden Reed, American author of Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell, defined slow art “as what transpires between the beholder and whatever she is looking at.” Reed deconstructs the foundation of slow art into two components: the object’s share and the observer’s share.2 While we know that the object is the result of an artist’s work, their labour is invisible in Reed’s breakdown of slow art. Although the viewer’s perspective and space for consideration is an integral element, so too is the process by which the artwork is created. To balance this relationship, Circadian foregrounds the materials the objects are made from; the natural rhythms present in the work; and the traditional, skilled, labour-intensive methods employed by the artists. The term circadian comes from the Latin circa, meaning “around/approximately,” and dies, meaning “day,” and refers to a form of timekeeping found in nature. Circadian rhythm, also referred to as the biological clock, is the general term for any process that regulates the sleep-wake cycles of living things, ranging from humans, animals, and plants to fungi and cyanobacteria. It is an internal mechanism that responds to daily, lunar, seasonal, and other natural cycles.3 Any significant disruption to this biological timekeeping — by societal or occupational demands — has the capacity to impact quality of life by increasing both physical and emotional health risks. 4 As our experience of time intensifies through media overstimulation and the pace of modern life, an appetite for deceleration is emerging. To feed this appetite, eight contemporary New Brunswick artists invite the viewer to take a moment to pause, linger, and reflect on time and place.
2 Arden Reed, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017) 3 Michael Allaby, A Dictionary of Ecology, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 4 Jung-Eun Lee and Isaac Edery, “Circadian Regulation in the Ability of Drosophila to Combat Pathogenic Infections,” Current Biology 18 no. 3 (2008): 195-99, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.12.054
Anna Torma’s studio, Baie Verte
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For Jim Boyd and Emilie Grace Lavoie, the durational effects of their artistic processes can be measured not only on their materials, but also on their physical selves.
JIM BOYD, based in Hampton, is a master stone carver who has travelled internationally to participate in sculpture symposiums. When at home, he uses the very foundations of the land around him. Boyd collects local boulders, carving directly into our geological time, reducing it moment by moment, chip by chip, into a contemporary representation of our understanding of nature. The forms that emerge are informed by a careful balance between his intention and the seeming intention of the stone itself: a lengthy conversation conducted through touch. Although laborious, he refers to the action of carving as meditative. It is a casual statement that seems 8 . . .
more consequential when we learn that Boyd pursued his practice of carving after the death of his father — to craft a memorial headstone. The meditative and transformative qualities of Boyd’s process also feed into the imagery he pursues, looking to the natural world for metaphors of cyclical transformation and growth.
“The pieces that I have been working on recently are varied. Some are related to environmental concerns, others to life, metamorphosis, and some simply a homage to the past.” — JIM BOYD
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“I enjoy the challenge of reforming and reducing a rock into something completely new. Most of the sculptures in stone that I have made are from local stone, usually granite and sandstone. Granite is a frustratingly hard stone to work with but I really love the range of colour and texture that one can attain depending how the surface is manipulated. Sandstone, on the other hand, is much softer than granite and I love the process of carving with hammer and chisel.” — JIM BOYD 10 . . .
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Jim Boyd, Wind and Water (detail), 2016
While Boyd’s process is subtractive, removing material, fragment by fragment, to allow new forms to emerge, Edmundston’s EMILIE GRACE LAVOIE’s process is additive. Her ceramic practice allows her to use the textures of the earth to build from scratch. Like Boyd, the forms Lavoie creates are also derived from the natural world. An amalgamation of biological research and imagination, her sculptural forms are nearly believable as living organisms. Within her practice, Lavoie unpicks the nuances of ecological connectivity, drawing attention to the complexities of the world around us. Her work fuses ceramics and textiles, and the juxtaposition of the soft and rigid speaks to the precarious nature of balance. Recently, Lavoie’s investigations of ecological balance have turned inward. Working with ceramics involves the whole body — from lifting heavy bags of clay to working it repeatedly with the hands, and transporting it for firing. In the studio, Lavoie practices well-being by pacing herself 12 . . .
and being mindful of the impact of her practice on her physical self as she works. She traces her own personal ecologies and considers the relationship between physical and emotional health, and the effects of time and life on the body.
“This process requires attention and a certain pace of work in order to successfully manipulate and ensure that the work can survive the many stages of the process. It’s a process that somehow connects me intimately to the work that I produce. It provides the means to understand my participation in the production of the work.” — EMILIE GRACE LAVOIE
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“Clay is a medium unlike almost any other sculptural process, you cannot leave it for several days and return to your work without the consistency of the clay having changed radically. . . . 14 . . .
While I am producing, I pay more attention to what surrounds me (energy, natural elements, forms, colour). I often notice that certain natural elements are specific to their environment and these new perspectives impact what I am making.” — EMILIE GRACE LAVOIE
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Emilie Grace Lavoie, Main d’œuvre, 2016
Where Boyd and Lavoie create rigid and weighty objects directly from the ancient depths of the earth beneath us, Tara Francis and Anna Torma collect both ethereal imagery and fleeting biological matter from above ground. Immersed in the metaphor of their findings, both artists choose to make contemporary work by culturally traditional methods.
TARA FRANCIS, a member of Elsipogtog First Nation, is deeply inspired by ecologies. She credits former teacher and mentor, the late Wolastoqey elder, Gwen Bear, with an education beyond the classroom, instilling Francis with an appreciation of her own culture. Today, she continues to explore ideas that were shared between them. Informed by the lessons of the medicine wheel and the inter-connectivity of all life, Francis creates representational figures 16 . . .
— turtles, moths, butterflies — metaphors that connect us to the natural rhythms of the world. Her process of traditional Mi’kmaw quillwork — from first collecting the porcupine to plucking, cleaning, and dyeing its quills — brings her into direct proximity to the ideologies, such as the seasons of life, outlined in the medicine wheel. The act of collecting the quills, however, is only the beginning of the cycle of Francis’s process. From here, she intricately pierces birch bark with individual quills, building up the surface with detail and form.
“The very act of creating quillwork is a ceremony, from collecting the natural materials and offering tobacco as thanks to Mother Earth, to the physical mechanics of inserting the quill into the bark.” — TARA FRANCIS
(left) Tara Francis, Mosaic PPQ Butterfly, 2005
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“In my private practice, in all my media, I maintain an awareness that what I am creating is indeed a sacred object, and I must be in a state of grace and peace for the creativity to flow, and the blessing to be felt purely by the receiver. A piece cannot be rushed. It must unfold in its own time: each element to be treated with the utmost care and respect — 18 . . .
each quill hand-chosen for how it will relate and contribute to the whole of the piece; each piece of birch bark selected for its own integrity and merit. Each final product is a reflection of a teaching, a journey, and a statement of who I am as a contemporary, Indigenous artist, striving to be a positive influence for the generations to come, whilst healing the strife of those who came before.” — TARA FRANCIS
Tara Francis, Turtle — Keeper of the 13 Moon Teachings, 2019
ANNA TORMA, too, works with natural fibres; her large textile works are mostly comprised of silks with occasional patches of cotton or wool. She learned traditional Hungarian embroidery at a very young age but she will tell you that her own technique was, in some ways, born out of necessity. Torma immigrated to Canada from Hungary in the 1980s and textiles were an accessible media. With two small children, Torma needed clean, safe materials. She now lives in Baie Verte where she continues to draw on her surroundings, combining natural imagery with a vibrant personal iconography. Torma’s richly layered textiles, all hand-embroidered, appear whimsical at first glance. Upon closer inspection, they are complex and epic in their scope, imagery, and intricacy. Torma’s layered imagery reads like a soft palimpsest of stitched children’s drawings, botanical and scientific illustrations. The amount of time that their construction represents and the time one could spend engaged with a work seems infinite. 20 . . .
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“If you have a baby, you have frequent interruptions and need a clean and chemical-free environment. Creativity comes into play within this framework of limitations, and needlework and drawing proved to be good tools to maintain a life as a creative person.” — ANNA TORMA
Anna Torma, Lullaby (detail), 1996
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Jud Crandall and Karen Stentaford collect and process sensory experiences. Gathered and reframed by their positioning in a new sphere, these natural elements become markers of a moment in time, allowing the viewer the illusion of presence — as if they, too, participated in the original instance. In an age of digital saturation, both Crandall and Stentaford choose the time-sensitive alchemy of analogue media.
JUD CRANDALL, of Saint John, uses sound to simultaneously comment on, manipulate, and deconstruct the spaces around us. As a sound maker, Crandall is informed by visual communication and works to collage field recordings with improvised sound; the political with the creative; structured rhythms with chaos. Crandall recognizes the subversive quality 24 . . .
of sound to infiltrate space and collective consciousness. Analogue recording technology is, by its nature, a time-based medium that requires absolute presence in the moment. Crandall’s lengthy process of sonic layering is balanced; at once calculated and reliant on the serendipity of slow discovery. In choosing to work this way, he inhabits his present fully. By recording and processing in real time, Crandall is reliving the moments as he manipulates the sound in the studio. By the time his construction is onto the airwaves, the original moment has lived a multiplicity of lives.
“Things that appeal to me about working with structure and texture of sound include elasticity and the co-mingling of inner and outer spaces, personal and public experiences.” — JUD CRANDALL
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“Analogue media encourages immediacy and presence. It is handson, limited and can often seem basic or rudimentary. Objects, sounds, and methods are readily re-purposed. I benefit from using both digital and analogue media, but the thinking and physicality behind putting a saxophone, drum or radio through a delay pedal is much more satisfying to me. Even when using digital methods to process or edit sound, I think in the language of analogue 26 . . .
technology, with visions of splicing and spaces in mind.” — JUD CRANDALL
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Jud Crandall, Unstable Beaches (installation view), 2019
Where Crandall is concerned with sound waves, KAREN STENTAFORD is concerned with light waves. From her Sackville studio, Stentaford also embraces the calculated methodology of the analogue, paired with the unknown. Coming to terms with place and memory through this photographic medium, Stentaford’s practice is rooted in alternative processes — primarily the wet plate collodion which yields glass negatives and tintypes. She often revisits familiar landscapes with century-old photographic technology, allowing herself to get lost in time and space. The images produced exist somewhere between recollection and dream, tapping into memory and how it can be distorted. Stentaford’s images of landscapes carry a deafening stillness even amid the blur of trees swept by the wind. There is longing, even loneliness, as if these images could only have been taken by a solitary person. Working in the field, Stentaford performs a ritual of measured existence; she must prepare the photographic surface with 28 . . .
collodion, read the light, frame and expose the plate, and prepare a dark space (typically the trunk of her car, or a portable ice fishing tent) to process the chemical reaction. And yet, there is still space for the unexpected — a lesson in relinquishing control and the value of abandoning oneself to the moment.
“With the wet plate collodion process, there is a lot of counting of time passing with exposure and processing — so my awareness of time during those fragmented moments is heightened. Otherwise my relationship with time is measured by becoming familiar with locations in which I’m working.” — KAREN STENTAFORD
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“I’ve always been invested in analogue media. The majority of processes I work with are 30 . . .
labour intensive, but they are also the processes that best fit the ideas I want to communicate.” — KAREN STENTAFORD
Karen Stentaford, Steam and Crack, near Hveragerรฐi, 2013
Janice Wright Cheney and Alana Morouney also value opportunities to get lost in the moment of discovery. Moreover, they foster opportunities for others to share the small magic of uncovering the unexpected and engaging in the present moment. Both artists work largely with modified traditional textile processes (embroidery, felting, and taxidermy for Wright Cheney, and knitting, weaving and felting for Morouney) paired with found objects. The convergence of the handmade with the found is both playful and poetic.
JANICE WRIGHT CHENEY, based in Fredericton, is engaged with history, wilderness, and how these two elements impact our understanding of and relationship with the natural world. She is purposeful and paces her lifestyle to hold space for closer observations of the world 32 . . .
around her. Wright Cheney places value on careful observation, looking with intention or “putting your eyes on,” a term she borrows from mushroom foragers. By allowing time for the act of observation, the forest, which Wright Cheney refers to as “a tapestry,” unfolds stitch by stitch. Her work — a n often uncanny marriage of found objects and meticulously hand-crafted representational forms — invites others to practise the same intentional observation. Melding fact with fiction, Wright Cheney prompts questions about ecologies, belonging, and what is real. By bringing objects, ideas, and imagery in and out of focus — t he intentional blurring of micro and macro — Wright Cheney encourages the viewer to pose questions that lead to a deeper, more holistic understanding of their own relationship to the natural world.
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“When we walk in the woods we see the forest as a whole — a pattern of shapes, textures and colours — that make up a pleasing visual background. But when examined more closely, as in the tapestry, the pattern dissolves and we realize we are examining very distinct individual specimens of moss, ferns, fungi, leaves, flowers, insects, lichen, bark, trees and so on.” — JANICE WRIGHT CHENEY
Janice Wright Cheney, Fera Moira (installation view), 2019
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While Wright Cheney is interested in ideas related to our relationship with the wilderness, ALANA MOROUNEY is engaged with our relationships to one another. Morouney’s work prompts questions about community, inter-personal relationships, and communication. Working from her small Sackville studio, she spends her time playfully crafting opportunities for viewers to stop and engage in a hands-on way with her work — to touch, leave a message, or play with it. Morouney’s textiles often use techniques traditionally associated with women’s groups: conversation, domesticity, and filling time. However, Morouney is not simply filling time; by employing these techniques, she both comments on and subverts the narrative, relaying secret messages within the knots of the work itself. In some cases, she makes skilled work of obsolescence and absence, translating anonymous messages into Morse code and weaving them to form the patterns of her textiles. Elsewhere, she turns traditional displays of status, like the 36 . . .
stag trophies of a hunter, into plushly knit forms. Morouney’s work is a hopeful encouragement to embrace the possibility of stumbling upon some small unexpected magic that might slow us down and bring us back to the present.
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“I use knitting, weaving, felting and leather intentionally to invite people into my work. We have such intimate 38 . . .
relationships with these materials — it’s instinctual to reach out and touch and feel, to see if it’s soft. I want people to have that sensory connection with my pieces.” — ALANA MOROUNEY
Alana Morouney, The Skull Series (detail), 2010
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Circadian is both a celebration of the pace of life in New Brunswick and the awakening that transpires when we are fully present in ourselves and our surroundings. This collection of work positions itself at the intersection of what it means to be an artist living and working in New Brunswick, engaged in time-intensive processes; and what it is for a viewer to make time, take time, and spend time engaging with the world around them through contemporary art. In New Brunswick, despite the imprint of local industry, we are privileged to have easy access to wooded areas, rivers, and the coast, and to revel in the clearly identifiable seasonal markers. Within their respective practices, Jim Boyd, Emilie Grace Lavoie, Tara Francis, Anna Torma, Jud Crandall, Karen Stentaford, Janice Wright Cheney and Alana Morouney acknowledge this privilege, and encourage us to decelerate, to pause, and to look and listen as the world unfolds around us. 40 . . .
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The Artists
Jim Boyd, Hampton Janice Wright Cheney, Fredericton Jud Crandall, Saint John Tara Francis, Elsipogtog First Nation/Fredericton 42 . . .
Emilie Grace Lavoie, Edmundston Alana Morouney, Sackville Karen Stentaford, Sackville Anna Torma, Baie Verte
About the Curator AMY ASH is an interdisciplinary contemporary artist engaged with processes of meaningmaking leading to a sense of belonging. She traces connectivity through the intersections and overlaps between memory, learning, and wonder to incite curiosity. Her practice flows from curatorial projects and writing, to teaching, socially engaged action, and hands-on making. Ash has exhibited and curated programmes internationally with projects recently commissioned by National Gallery London, The New Brunswick International Sculpture Symposium, and Third Space Gallery. Of settler ancestry, she currently lives and works in Saint John, New Brunswick, a small coastal city which sits on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik and Mi’kmaq Peoples. 43 . . .
www.amyash.ca
Copyright © 2020, AX, the Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-9992960-0-1 Photography by Amy Ash with the exception of the following: Caleb Jones/Jones Gallery (p. 15); Star Simon (p. 16); Ivan Zsako (pp. 22-23); Graeme Stewart-Robinson (p. 27); Karen Stentaford (p. 31); and D’Arcy Wilson (pp. 34-35). Edited by Jane Simpson and Goose Lane Editions. Publication design by Julie Scriver, Goose Lane Editions. Cover image, pp. 2, 4, and 41: Janice Wright Cheney, printed cloth detail, 2019 (photo: Gabrielle Gionet). Printed in Canada by Rapido Books.
AX, the Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex and Amy Ash would like to acknowledge their gratitude to the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation for their commitment to fostering curatorial practice in New Brunswick — without their generous support this project would not have been possible.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition Circadian at AX, the Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex in January, 2020, curated by Amy Ash. AX, the Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex 12 Maple Avenue Sussex, New Brunswick Canada E4E 2N5 axartscentre.ca
Circadian is both a celebration of the pace of life in
CE
LA VO
IE
W E
IC JA N
Y
J IM B
NE
OY D
OU
Circadian
AMY ASH, CURATOR
N STENTAFORD K A RE
contemporary art.
RA
OR
spend time engaging with the world around them through
IE G
AM
and what it is for a viewer to make time, take time, and
EMI L
AN
This collection of work positions itself at the intersection New Brunswick, engaged in time-intensive processes;
L TARA FR ANCIS
AL
we are fully present in ourselves and our surroundings. of what it means to be an artist living and working in
HT
NDA L
RI
G
New Brunswick and the awakening that transpires when
C
N HE
EY
JU
RA DC
A
NN A TO R
MA
Cover image: Janice Wright Cheney, printed cloth detail, 2019
AX, the Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex