UniSA Yungondi Gallery: Lucia Dohrmann

Throughout my honours year of study in 2017, and beyond, I have been exploring the possibilities of traditional painting materials through connections between pattern and repetition, textile techniques and mathematics. Repetition is a key element that exists in formal patterning, textile processes and mathematics.

I have undertaken a strategy of limiting myself to using the raw materials of artists’ canvas and paint, employing unconventional painting processes to these. My honours body of work consists of abstract paintings that emphasis materiality and process. They have been constructed by unravelling the canvas, crocheting these unravelled threads and hand stitching and weaving. These traditional skills were taught to me as a child by my mother and have become part of my visual language.

The striped linen work has been constructed using the processes of patchwork quilting, such as measuring, cutting and using quarter inch seam allowances. Quilters rely on geometry to design their patterns, using mathematical principles of tessellated shapes and symmetry. The woven linen work makes use of numbered sequences to build up an overall weaved gridded pattern. The white paint applied to these linen works reference my cultural background with white work embroidery preferred by Italian women historically.

The colours used for my unravelled works suggest those of Roman buildings and paved bluestone streets. These works were a discovery made in studio practice when I painted pieces of canvas and unravelled these to provide me with coloured threads to crochet with. These later became works
in their own right. They speak directly to the nature of paint and how it penetrates the fibres of the canvas. I am currently working on a series of paintings with striped patterns based on mathematical sequences.