BATH, England — Cotton, a fabric imbued with an extended and brutal racialized historical past, kinds a part of the enmeshment of Western European wealth, structure, and artwork with Black histories and cultures. For Diedrick Brackens, these complicated associations kind the inspiration for his large-scale tapestry works exploring African American id, proven in the UK for the primary time on the Holburne Museum.
Brackens drew upon a collage of methods, starting from European tapestry to West African weaving and quilting traditions from the American South, to make the 4 items on view. Alongside standard dyes, he additionally hand-stains the cotton threads with pigments resembling wine or tea. There’s a homey high quality to those tapestries’ roughness of the weave and hand-tied tassels; they resemble objects made for each ornament and sensible use from supplies obtainable readily available. Some items have been woven in sections and stitched collectively, with pictorial parts aligning imperfectly throughout the divides. There are unfastened threads in locations, contributing to a barely unfinished high quality that implies incomplete narratives, historic gaps, and ongoing mythologies.
In “at the length of a season: blood ghost” (2024), hanging pink threads counsel blood dripping from a ghostly human physique interwoven into the picture of a sacrificial deer trussed and carried on a pole by two silhouetted human figures. The pared-down symbols of the work counsel allegory, or maybe a retelling of a folks story, however the particulars stay opaque and open to interpretation. In “prodigal” (2023), a determine lifts a knife above a fats pig as a blood-red solar rises or units behind them, combining an allusion to the biblical story of the Prodigal Son with an environment of violence and uncertainty.
Diedrick Brackens, “prodigal” (2023), cotton and acrylic yarn
In earlier exhibitions, resembling these at Jack Shainman Gallery or the Sharjah Biennial, Brackens’s tapestries have predominantly been held on the wall. On the Holburne, nonetheless, the items are suspended from picket frames positioned at angles within the middle of the neoclassical Ballroom Gallery, positioning the paintings as sculpture or set up and inspiring viewers to circumnavigate them. The backs of the works, the place photographs are seen in reverse and solely among the parts of the ultimate composition bleed by means of, supply a special perspective. Within the aforementioned works “at the length of a season” and “prodigal,” as an example, the animals may be seen from the again, whereas the human figures can not — fairly, they emerge like ghostly apparitions as one comes across the entrance.
The simplicity of the picket frames contrasts sharply with the ornateness of the grand room, which can also be used to show 18th-century gilt-framed work and elaborate ornamental objects. On this context, Brackens’s weavings obliquely remind guests of the Holburne Museum’s foundational hyperlinks with Caribbean plantations and the slave commerce. Right here, Brackens’s monochrome figures additionally relate to the various Eighth-century silhouette portraits within the museum’s assortment. Exactly reduce from black paper or painted on glass, these small works capturing a likeness from the shoulders up have been in style among the many upper-middle lessons through the top of British colonial growth and the slave commerce. Brackens’s silhouetted figures, then again, are rougher-edged, bigger, and full-body, claiming possession of a story usually unseen in depictions of Georgian Britain. Taken together with his tapestries, Brackens’s work signifies the myriad methods wherein these histories are knitted collectively throughout continents and cultures. And of their multitivocal ambiguity, they provide the potential to weave new and untold narratives.
Set up view of Diedrick Brackens, “at the length of a season: blood ghost” (2024), cotton and acrylic yarn
Set up view of Diedrick Brackens: Woven Tales on the Holburne Museum (photograph Anna Souter/Hyperallergic)
Diedrick Brackens, “if you have ghosts” (2024), cotton and acrylic yarn
Diedrick Brackens: Woven Tales continues on the Holburne Museum (Nice Pulteney Avenue, Bathwick, Bathtub, United Kingdom) by means of Could 26. The exhibition is curated by Layla Gatens and Chris Stephens.