In Como, a small town on the southern shore of Lake Como north of Milan, the Museo della Seta (Silk Museum) recently showed the textile works of Lithuanian artist Inga Liksaite in a solo exhibition called ‘Waterhome’.
The works are a mixture of hand-stitching and machine-stitched canvases, making use of small stitches to create a pattern that only translates its subject when viewed from afar, like an Impressionist painting.
“Pictorial quality seen from a distance is broken if you take a closer look, the eye dives into micro scheme-like patterns that suppress the bigger image and open new hypnotising perspectives,” Liksaite says. “My individual aesthetic language developed based on grids, linear rhymes, geometric patterns, and forms a substance for a bigger image.”
Her subjects are houses and human figures, with some mimicking the quality of a photograph and some that of classical paintings, with repeating patterns that suggest a texture to the images, representing light and shade – there are no blocky outlines here.
Liksaite sees stitch as the starting point of her narratives and a construct for her expression, but does not consider herself a textile artist, more an artist who mainly works in textiles. “Years of practicing with the sewing process opened to me various meanings of what this medium may contain.”
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