VIA 

The art project VIA presents multimedia works by artists from the Wales, Ireland, Serbia and Croatia. Venice became a link between the artists, a place where they met at crucial moments of their life; those well known moments of a sense of not belonging and loss, yet a profound need to discover our own place under the sun.

Highlights

mixed dimensions, six suspended light objects with lace

Galerjia Kortil, Rijeka, Croatia

The desire of anonymous artists to create beauty and carry forth the knowledge and skills of their cultures has been portrayed for centuries through hand made objects of unique beauty and pieces of art. (The Lace from Pag, Nerina Eckel www.lacecorner.com) 

Lace intertwines. Threads are spun, wound, or braided together and in the process a repertoire of stories become entangled. As items of embroidery each contains a narrative of its maker revealed through the designs, weave-work and stitches that reflect locally-specific patterns, techniques and skills. Italian fashion designer Miuccia Prada stated her interest in the way lace "follows women through their lives", from christening gown to wedding dress, from lingerie to widow's veil. And as well as binding together events in a single biography, lace draws together women of different cultures, classes and backgrounds. Its use in ceremony, festivals and fashion is contrasted with its more mundane application in the home for curtains or for decorating plates when serving tea - a practice familiar in rural Wales as much as the rest of Europe. Lacemaking, like most other traditional crafts has its industrial counterpart in methods of mass production where designs are computer generated and synthetic fibers woven on automated machines. Far from reducing the value of the old handcraft, this mass-market product shines a light on precisely what it is about lace that makes it so special. I have created a series of light pieces dressed in handcrafted lace sourced from Murano in Venice, from Britain, the lace regions of Europe and from Pag Island in Croatia. Expanded from their usually flat appearance into three-dimensional spheres these objects allude to the global (political, economic, social) entanglements of lacemaking. Illuminated from within and situated in a darkened space, the embroidered patterns become shadows that work to intertwine the lives of the women and, in the process, celebrate the domestic, the family and the feminine.