- August 11, 2022
Soft Impressions (2021-2022)
Soft Impressions is a video piece that features a hand-stitched artist book being leafed through by the artist’s grandmother. The pages are hand printed linocuts on color catcher sheets that tell the stories of different female artists from the same family. The soft book is aimed to invoke a sense of touch, care, and interdependence, and each pair of pages is a form of intergenerational dialogue.
The sheets, which contain residual dyes from washed clothing invoke care work, comfort, and the question of waste and consumption, while the process of hand printing traces different voices from my family history. It is a small format that should be held, handled, and observed from a small distance, just like the multitude of other objects of women’s use and creative production that came before it.
I was inspired by the 女书 practice of the third-day missive (sanzhaoshu) in which women of different generations create a collective letter for a member of their family who is leaving the home. The book sums up some of the artistic phenomena I have been exploring over the past three years through my thesis project – embroidery as a form of communication and artistic expression, touch as a method of creating intimacy with the viewer, women’s collaborative practice and writing.