RETURN TO RECENT WORKS
Dressing room, 2021
Details
Dressing Room
100 clay vessels, 100 bunches of line flax (50 from 2019 harvest, 50 from 2020 Lineation harvest)
Dressing Room (Off-Cuts)
100 clay cones, flax tow
The Distaff Dresser
6 watercolours on flax tow paper
Photography: Keith Hunter & Sally Jubb
Links
Art Lates - 2 (at 44 mins)
Patricia Fleming Projects
Botanics
Doris Press Review
Hyperallergic Review
Map Magazine Review
DESCRIPTION
An exhibition of new works exploring the lifecycle of flax (Linum usitatissimum) and considering the symbiotic nature of its nurture, evolving the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s 350-year relationship with the plant.
Spun flax fibres produce linen, one of the most ancient forms of textile. Prized too for its seeds’ medicinal properties, flax featured in Hortus Medicus Edinburgensis, the first catalogue of a plant collection in Scotland, which listed 3,000 plants growing at Edinburgh’s Physic Garden in 1670 – later to become RBGE. In 2021, Borland planted flax at RBGE, continuing the contemporary and historical cycles embedded in this project. In Relation to Linum is an intimate reconnection with the ecological heritage and future of growing and making practices, and their associations with care.
Extract from RBGE Guide
Dressing Room, Dressing Room (Off-Cuts) & The Flax Dresser
These 3 works incorporate the material and processes resulting from the cycle of flax growing and processing represented throughout the exhibition. The two connecting circular formations of Dressing Room contain the line flax grown in Huntly in 2019 and the combined flax grown by #Lineation growers in 2020. The bunches of smooth, combed line flax are held inside cone-shaped containers made from a mix of terracotta and wild clay gathered from a beach near the artists home and fired in her garden.
Cone forms are important in flax spinning as distaffs which hold the fibres being drawn down to be spun either with a drop spindle or a spinning wheel. The term ‘Spinster’ is closely associated with the distaff; the flax was fixed to it with a ribbon, the colour indicating whether the spinner was married or not; blue to denote married, green unmarried (different sources indicate different colours) The Flax Dresser watercolours record intimate haptic and material gestures both real and imagined, in the process of dressing the conical distaff, working from line of flax tied around the waist. Dressing Room (Off-Cuts) uses the off-combings of short tow-fibre from the process of ‘heckling’ suspended in a web-like formations from the tips of the ceramic cones which are cut from the conical ceramic holders in Dressing Room.
