Mark Corfield-Moore is a painter whose practice holds woven textiles at its core. The conception of fabrics as nomadic objects is fundamental to his work. Investigating the historic use of textiles in the production of rugs and tents, items that are portable and attached to no specific location, his understanding of fabrics and his practice at large is rooted in this sense of transience. These ideas draw, in part, on the artist’s own mixed Thai and British heritage, a diasporic identity he consciously reflects upon and interrogates with nuance in his work.

Utilising a distinctive technique based on ikat, a process he learnt in northern Thailand, the artist askews the traditional method of binding and dyeing by painting directly onto the warp threads. Winding the threads on the loom further complicates and distorts the image resulting in a unique glitchiness or what he calls a ‘fizzy heat’. The instability of the form reflects his interest in the nature of both personal memory and collective history, a meditation into our evolving relationship with the past.

The exhibition features a new body of works which utilize the ikat weaving  technique that  Corfield-Moore learnt in Northern Thailand. In place of traditional binding and dyeing, he paints directly onto the warp threads before winding them on the loom and then hand weaving. These woven paintings are then stretched and presented on canvases. Ikat is distinctive due to its  glitchy or blurry aesthetic, and the artist likens this instability to the subject of memories and our constantly evolving relationship to the past. Other Follies and Picnics draws upon   childhood picnics that the artist and  his family had at the historic estate of Stourhead in England through his own renditions of the actual follies featured in these gardens. Often mimicking classical temples,  follies  are  fantastical  architectural  buildings  designed  for amusement  and  pleasure.

Through  his  depictions,  Corfield-Moore  undermines a more straight forward reading of these buildings by including the names of traditional Thai dishes, the ones that he and his family would have eaten during their visits.

MARK CORFIELD-MOORE

The artisti pictured in front of one of his dyed warp and handwoven cotton artworks, 2019.

Photo credit: Anna Arca

The strength of these works lies in their ambiguity and playful sense of humor, where both the societal and the personal, the historic and the mundane are simultaneously combined.

The medium of textiles is one that is malleable and reworkable. Historically used for tents or rugs, its ability to claim space is what interests Corfield-Moore, and he draws parallels between this use of space and the act of setting up for a picnic. The thresholds between public and private, historical and personal, and Western and Thai are fertile spaces that the artist explores, while the act of weaving becomes a meditation on the idiosyncrasies of past events and experiences.