The Gallery
TracesAinsley Hillard
19 September - 08 November 2008
Mission Gallery is pleased to present a site specific installation by Carmarthenshire based textile artist, Ainsley Hillard. Hillard will create an installation inspired by the social and architectural history of Mission Gallery exploring the interrelationships between people, memory and space.
Hillard will create a series of hand-woven structures incorporating mediums such as photography and print that integrate structure and image. The photographic images of objects such as chapel chairs, reading tables and books communicate a shared sense of history, an irrecoverable past. These images are transfigured into woven structures through a process of heat-transfer on to the transparent viscose weft prior to then being hand-woven through a nylon monofilament warp. The images, once woven into structural forms, connect with one another and once installed allow an overlapping fabric. The movement of the audience through the space enables images to come forth and recede much like the passage of the thread that travels through the warp structure. The multiplicity of standpoints and perspectives reactivates peripheral vision and reinforces haptic experience. In the gallery an audio installation emanates elusive sounds from speakers that can only be received in intervals as the audience moves through the space, the body becoming a vehicle of experience. The sounds created are reminiscent of the objects that once existed in the space yet remain familiar, the pages turning of a book, the gliding movement of ink as it is scribed on to paper, the sound of the bell ringing as a call to the people to congregate or the signal of a ship lost at sea.
Ainsley Hillard was born in Carmarthenshire, Wales. Graduating in 2000 from Middlesex University after studying Constructed Textiles, Hillard received the James Pantyfedwen Scholarship in 2001 and 2002 to continue Postgraduate Studies in Visual Art at Curtin University, Australia. In 2003 she exhibited the work 'In Passing' at the John Curtin Art Gallery and then continued to live and work in Perth until February 200, holding a position as Technical Officer and Part-time Lecturer in the Department of Art, Curtin University.
Hillard has exhibited nationally and internationally. Past solo exhibitions have included ‘'Parallax' at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia in May 2004. The exhibition coincided with the International Textile Conference 'The Space Between'. Her work is also represented in International Collections such as the Lloyd Cotsen' Textile Traces' Collection in USA.
Hillard has recently returned to live and work in Wales and is currently part-time lecturer at Swansea Metropolitan University.
