Image and Text: Embroidered Disruptions
Words have meanings, but so do images. As media theorist Marshall McCluhan said way back in 1964, “The media is the message.” In the presented works, Gates uses the medium of embroidery (often associated with feminine household labor, but also queens) to create an interplay of language and images. The resulting work highlights contextual influence over raw material.
Alison Gates
Professor Alison A. Gates (she/her/hers) is head of Fibers/Textiles in the Art and Design program at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, where she also teaches in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her work in sculpture and textiles often focuses on the ambiguity of language and non-verbal means of communication.
This embroidered art is so powerful in the way it works to slowly (one imagines the artist doing it stitch by stitch rather than in broad strokes) links word, image and story and invites us to reflect and find new meanings. Also important is the way in which the artist has carefully chosen her materials, recalling to us that we always make things out of things that were already made, there is nothing new in the new, except of course what emerges as new in the reflective mind.
This wonderful work of Alison is sooooo subversive! The visible/ invisible is so powerful!