ART, ARTS AND CRAFTS AND A SOCIAL PROJECT – AT THE SAME TIME
Review by Lisbet Ahnoff, Göteborgs Posten 2005 04 16
The exhibition Bosna Quilts has its origin in the war refugee camp Galina. It is one, in several aspects, interlaced story we are confronted with.
Bosna Quilts is the title of the textile pictures which are shown in the Gallery Epidemic of Art, Göteborg, Sweden and can be looked upon in a few different perspectives.
I first see simple fields of colours, rather severe, calm designs, quite geometric and symmetric, but with different displacements and nuanced additions. The works make me associate to abstract painting, for instance by Barnett Newman. At the same time they are quilted and make me think of both Amish quilts and other textiles.
Having circulated for a while, I get more and more interested in the variations in the silent movement on the surface. The swarm of stitches creates by its thin padding a relief pattern on the colour surface. Orange-yellow stitches shape beige-grey fields into something looking like a clay ground, red stitches glim like fire bushes in dark blue depths. The character of the relief is sometimes livlier, other times more discreete. Flourishing wavy or strictly geometric, richly varied or faithfully symmetric. Through the quilting the pictures get their own materialization, a body, with shifting appeal and individuality. They bubble of secret stories.
In that way a dialogue is created in the quilts which also reflects the working process.
Bosna Quilts is the results of an amount of things. The background is the war in Bosnia 1992-95, when great many people were forced to flee from violence and devastation. In the refugee camp Galina in the Austrian region of Vorarlberg, among the women of Gorazde, the artist Lusia Feinig-Giesinger started the project to give the Bosnians meaningful work and self-esteem. Today the production is still going on, but now some of the women have returned to Gorazde. Here the unemployment is high and the project contribute to the earning of living.
The working with the textiles became a meeting place. Lucia´s own artistry does not usually deal with textiles, but she chosed this way of working where she from painted sketches makes designs of monochrome fabrics, which later on are quilted. The idea comes from an Indian coverlet, she saw, so it is not actually a local tradition. But I think of the softness of textiles and that the possibilities of shaping structures have a mental/symbolic value.
The quilting itself is an essential part of the whole. Most of the sewing women, who are twelve, have another professional background, but captured the technique, each in her own way.
Thus when these pieces of art are hanged up on the gallery walls, it is an interlaced story we meet, which can awake a number of questions. We are brought away from art as a pure individual expression and initiative, or? The involved persons both give and take, out of different conditions. It is perhaps for the quilting women both about liberation and adjustment, like the artist Lucia, being both more visible and more invisible than other times. It is a social project, handicraft and art at the same time.
Translated by Marianne Erikson