Christine Risley Award

The judging panel was unanimous in its praise for Olivia’s installation, with our guest judge, Natasha Hoare (Senior Curator, Goldsmiths CCA), commenting:

"(Olivia’s) marshalling of affective qualities of light, sound, and sculpture to create an immersive and contemplative space was impressive. Equally striking was her craft and innovative use of weaving to create panels of suspended stones, and singular wrapped stone sculptures. She showed a commendable ability to meet the subject matter of the materiality of the South Sussex landscape and its geological strata, with a transcendental sense of time and our subjective position within it. The installation demonstrated maturity and synthesis, and we look forward to seeing more from her."

Our guest judge, Dr Grant Watson, curator and researcher, writes of May’s work:

We are delighted to give Azna May the Christine Risley Award in response to a unique and unexpected installation linked by a textile element. The artist uses a sophisticated combination of textile materials and techniques including embroidery, patchwork, print and quilting to create sculptural forms and costumes that convey personal narratives and invented mythologies.

In her work, Woven Journeys, Alice explored the ways in which textiles can be used as a visual language through hand craft. Inspired by the origins of the jacquard looms with their connection to coded language, and the way in which domestic crafts can translate personal data, using home weaving Alice formulated her own visual language as a way of taking ownership of self-surveillance.

Our guest judge, Dr Janice Cheddie (researcher and writer), writes of Alice’s work that it ‘… demonstrated a vibrant, complex and nuanced engagement with textiles - in terms of materiality, mark making, data collection, community formation and textiles as a vehicle for memory, archiving and formation of the self.

The realisation of the idea remained at all times engaged with the materiality of textiles -whilst incorporating dialogues with data collection, mapping and local craft communities- presented with a lightness of touch within the final work. Furthermore, the recipient of the 2022 Christine Risley Award, was able to present her work deftly combining an understanding of the presentation of textiles within a gallery-setting and the display and presentation of her research, processes and providing a template for future work and preservation.’ 

Aarushi’s work, Stitched Sedition, is a continuously growing archive on textile that records the district-wide network shutdowns in India. Having analysed open source data, Aarushi created a visual language that encoded district, duration, cause and networks affected by shutdowns. Addressing the vital issue of repression of democratic expression, the embroidery, and the act of embroidering, is at once both a means of archiving a story and a performative piece that facilitates a conversation.

Guest judge Katie Simpson (Curator, Jupiter Woods) comments, "Aarushi’s commitment to documenting the network shutdowns in India is an act of solidarity and protest that extends beyond the work itself; she performs - through her hands and bodily labour – her own blackout, by working ‘away from keyboard’ to archive the timelines of those excluded from the digital space.

"Aarushi is raising awareness through a time-based work that continuously evolves, lengthens and extends and I have a strong desire to revisit and spend time with the piece again. One for the archive, this work also acts as a vital map or data sheet, documenting a moment in 21st century history that can be referred to in the future. This is therefore an important work, exemplifying the power of art in engaging with the political and social issues of our time."

Due to the postponement of degree shows this year the award was judged from online submissions. The entries were a testament to the resilience shown by the student population during this difficult time and the judges were particularly impressed by the strength of Tyreis Holder’s practice which explores self-identity and her own ‘trilogy of cultures’ through the language of textiles and clothing.  

In the words of the guest judge, Rose Sinclair, ‘these works are rooted sensitively within ideas based around a divided self, and the relationship between textile and the body, textiles and text, and text and orality, describing the emergence of an identity.’   

With roots in black music, poetry and textiles, Tyreis translates her own poetry into textile pieces, installations and performances. In ‘IDK, I’m calling this Midnight hue, or suttin like dat’ (2019), commissioned by local arts festival Deptford X, she creates a site of healing in response to the systemic oppression of black women. The choice to leave garments unfinished or unhemmed reflects the nature of her mother tongue, Patois (translated as ‘rough speech’) and conveys a narrative that the artist describes as existing ‘freely on a continuum, with no ending or fullstop’. Rose Sinclair notes that ‘there is the connection throughout between the historical narrative of textile seen through the artefact of 'crochet' in the Caribbean space and artefact of 'patois' both tracers of moments and embodied practices of self-identity.’  

Riley Gray's practice deals with misogynoir with a current focus on hair within black cultures. She is also interested in the rituals behind textiles and weaving, examining the way in which materials can convey relationships between culture, race and gendered product making, as well as their potential to hold diasporic stories absent from other historical or archival sources.

The textile work consists of a blanket constructed from handwoven squares of black hair. In the words of guest judge Dr Christine Checinska (Artist, Writer, Designer):

‘The textures, the techniques in crafting black hair, the subtle differences in colour from jet black to mahogany brown was a quiet statement in the ‘good hair/bad hair’ conundrum rooted in enslavement that black women are forced to navigate at an inner level before finding themselves’.

The intimacy of the blanket was paralleled by the spoken word quietly emanating from speakers placed either side of a bench from which to view the textile. Drawing on Farrah’s own daily experiences, the words document the experiences of many black women.

Adi’s work situates the use of textiles amongst a thoughtful and multi-layered installation including narratives that are present and urgent, making textiles speak about issues of accessibility and inclusion. like a lit match in a NU-FREEZER: held will be on view at the Constance Howard Gallery from 21 September – 2 November 2018.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of free public events and workshops led by collaborators Tiya Dahyabhai, Christina Simpson, Nadeem Din-Gabisi and EAST (Eating At the Same Table), as well as a themed Talking Textiles and object handling session. Please see the Goldsmiths Event Calendar for dates and details. A publication in the form of a CD will accompany the exhibition.

The Goldsmiths Textile Collection and Constance Howard Gallery is delighted to announce that the winner of the Christine Risley Award 2017 is BA (Hons) Fine Art graduate Clémentine Marie Jeanne Durand-Bedos.

The judging panel unanimously agreed on the strength of her work, Contagious Hystories, which, very sensitively dealt with ideas around the divided self, drawing upon the relationship between textile and the body to physically and spatially describe the emergence of two separate identities from a whole, through a 1.5 hour performance. Utilising digital, and screen printing in combination with cyanotype processes, the hand-made garments, which draw on personal, family and cultural histories, embody this metamorphosis.

In the words of guest judge Professor Lesley Millar MBE:

[the] ‘use of cloth and textile thinking … both illustrates and embodies her theme. Her personal history is embedded in the dyed and patterned cloth and clothing which she uses to interrogate place and identity. The work generates a sense of completeness, as the relationships between body, cloth and viewer are explored through the intimate touch of the textile. It is an exceptional artwork’.

The performance boldly demarcates its site, held in an autonomous temporary structure on ‘disused’ land in New Cross, from which travellers were recently evicted, and live streamed at Goldsmiths for the Degree Show. Asking the audience to climb over a wall into this confined space, requires them to enact a sense of displacement. Through the intimacy of the performative experience, the artist creates communities of inclusion through place.

In the words of guest judge, Jennifer Harris (Deputy Director, the Whitworth, Manchester), 'her sculptural pieces demonstrate a profound material sensibility that aligns them with the kind of work that is being produced as part of the "material turn" that so much international art has taken in recent years'.

A collection of experimental pieces that demonstrate Madsen's investigative approach to how we encounter objects. Working with materials that shift, melt, cut, harden, spread and absorb, Madsen explores surfaces of internal and external change. Her seductive combinations of often disparate materials subvert their own haptic qualities in a way that is at once alluring, destabalising and uncanny.

'It is most often the materials' qualities of being too familiar giving way to the them becoming increasingly odd or even alien as I focus on them, that attracts, puzzles and provides me with a nervous energy’ (Louise Madsen).

With an approach to making and materiality that is both embedded in the tactile whilst resisting any tendency to be 'pinned down', Madsen is developing a rich language which resonates with a long history of material expression and what Jennifer Harris refers to as 'the productive indeterminacy of contemporary art textiles'.

The judging panel was drawn to her in depth engagement with the physical and psychological nature of materiality through process of tufting and were impressed by Lauw’s commitment to perfecting a technique and creating a very ambitious set of works.

Melinda Lauw is interested in haptic perception and her works responds to the powerful sensations that can be experienced through materiality. She trawls the internet for textual, visual and auditory stimuli and accounts of strong physical or physcological reactions to the material. It is apt that she chooses the technique of hand tufting to explore her own experience of trypophobia, the fear of clusters of holes.

The process involves shooting yarn through a loose weave ground fabric, gradually filling the spaces in the structure of the fabric to build up the carpeted surface. Through the almost obsessively repeated clusters of cell or spore like motifs, the works spread across the wall or settle inside inviting bowl shaped structures.

The judging panel agreed that her works demonstrate a sensual engagement with materials in a way which considers a tactile relationship between object and viewer.

Dealing with subtle transitions and shifts in materiality, Sophia Freeman likens her sculptural pieces to an image in the opening scenes of Claire Denis’s film ‘Trouble Every Day’, where the surface of the river Seine temporarily engulfs the screen.

‘As Saige Walton (2013) argues, during this brief moment the water is presented to us “as if it were a moving textile”. She notes that as the dissolves continue, the image retreats, revealing bridges and street lighting - thus locating the restless screen of fabric horizontally, the material texture implied by fabric subtly shifts to the substance of water’. Sophia Freeman (2014).

In the same way that Denis creates slippages between perceived image and actual substance, Sophia uses the process of casting to subvert the material identity of her sculptures. Latex is used as a skin within which to create plaster objects. These are then re-cast. Through a process of twisting and manipulating the mould, the backs of the original plaster pieces are revealed, allowing the soft folds of the front of the sculptures to take on a dynamic fluidity which gravity originally defied. The treatment of the surfaces with car paint further obscures the material of their origin. ‘…the outward appearance is in subtle discord with its brittle physical matter. I indented the ‘twist’ to create an allusion to lightness - as if the sculpture had been delicately posed - again, in dissonance with its materiality’. Sophia Freeman (2014).

The works may evoke visions of dirty mattresses, discarded sleeping bags or contorted bed linen, yet they remain autonomous in their identity. ‘Perhaps it’s because of their “lack” - or failure as definitively recognizable object-world things, that the works invite, as Laura Marks (2010) writes, a “haptic visuality” - a kind of “viewing which draws on other forms of sense experience (...) thus (being) a ‘tactile’ way of seeing and knowing which more directly involves the viewer’s body.”’ Sophia Freeman (2014).