Stella Harding
Show Your Working Out
7th March- 4th May 2010
‘I am interested in dualities and paradoxes and what happens in the spaces where differences coincide. Sometimes there is chaos and sometimes harmony.
In my current practice I use basketry techniques to weave together multiple story lines. One is my fascination with the Turks head bangle. A paradox: it looks on the surface like a multi-stranded plait but is constructed from a single element that is both warp and weft, alternately active and passive, the weave unending - until the thread runs out. A second paradox is my attraction to the mathematical structures underlying and revealed by the plaiting techniques that I enjoy despite being a life long maths phobic. Opposites attract. The hand can grasp what the mind lets slip. A third strand is the duality of culture and nature and the ways in which they weave together in unexpected ways - each one leaving its mark upon the fabric of the other.
There are other strands and many loose ends. The pieces in this show are part of the process of working out how they might be drawn together.’
Stella Harding is a London based artist with a studio in Deptford. She has exhibited her work across Europe, including the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art and the Barbican Centre. Since 2009 she has been a selected maker in the Crafts Councils Emerging Makers Programme in Contemporary Basketry.