LOME
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Anna Fiedler’s wire weavings evoke the bodily form of the torso; its structure and suppleness, its symmetry and malleability. The body, however, is also an idealised form – constrained in the social imagination by moral and aesthetic values.
Each piece is woven with paper-coated floristry wire and deadstock yarn. The yarn is Crimplene, a polyester fiber that was invented in 1959 with the purpose of making crease-free women’s clothes. The fabric, which was found to be unbreathable and suffocating, was discontinued ten years after its first production. In the context of these works, the yarn takes on the form of a bodice – a restrictive undergarment designed with the superficial idealism of the female figure. The wire weft reinforces the structure of the bodice, but the forms have also been manipulated to create protrusions, curves and softness. Through these works, the body is figured as an unwieldy organic form bound by and in resistance to the social ideals that confine it.
Anna employs a unique practice of painting the warp threads prior to weaving in the weft, a method that disrupts the premeditated and calculated techniques associated with traditional weaving, whilst maintaining a devotion to traditional structure. Here, vertical lines painted at even intervals onto the warp signify the body’s symmetry. However, these straight lines are moulded to the curve of each work and muddled softly by the weave. What we see and feel through these weavings is the tension of holding in, and of letting go. The sensation of relaxing and digesting. The restriction of the waist and the loosening of the stomach, its protrusion. A subconscious daily act.
Wire and yarn – forms protruding from their own constraints – chain mail, bodice – a not-quite symmetry
of natural figures – bodies that grow into themselves – intuitive imagery overlaid on traditional structure –
abstraction and expansiveness – holding in, letting go – intimacy and immediacy – improvisation and
technique – digging into history and drawing forth aesthetic tensions – idealisation and felt reality –
materials that have their own histories in manufacture and production – repurposed – a state between
effort and effect – doubleness, balancing, movements between – straight lines curved and muddled by
human hand – subconscious daily acts – personal iconographies – transparencies – the mind loosens into
feeling – short poems of capture and release.
by Roslyn Orlando
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Anna Fiedler’s practice utilises the process of weaving to remove the boundaries surrounding traditional craft making. Her woven objects attempt to re-deduce their fixity between both craft and new materialism. Interlacing materials and themes from the past and present, Anna fosters a connection to her environment, weaving the old and the new with natural fibres and recycled materials. Her woven paintings are unbounded; finding a criticality within the process, softening differences between process and outcome.
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