If you're still in a Coronavirus lockdown, you're probably dreaming of being able to take a long walk in nature, but there is an artist who invites the nature indoor with her works, Alexandra Kehayoglou.
The Argentinean artist is known indeed for her creations inspired by nature and made employing the tufting technique. Kehayoglou first started experimenting with it using discarded materials from the carpet company founded by her family, El Espartano, over 60 years ago. Though Kehayoglou studied painting in art school, she realised these materials could have been reused to create woven - rather than painted - landscapes with a tactile quality added.
Kehayoglou then took things further and soon started creating vast tapestries, monumental interpretations of her native landscapes, reproducing through her three-dimensional textures and patterns detailed views, comprising hyper-realistic grass, desert islands, caves, glaciers and water.
The process is time-consuming (it may take several months to complete one of the largest pieces), but it is utterly fascinating: Kehayoglou makes her rugs with a combined process, She employs indeed an electric tufting gun, then she sculpts and refines the carpet using scissors.
There are other contemporary artists who combine their love for natural landscapes with art and interior design as well, creating textile-based installations, but Kehayoglou is among the very few ones whose practice mainly revolves around the tufting technique, through which she recreates site specific installations that can cover an entire room and smaller pieces as well.
Among her large pieces there is a perfect aerial view of the Santa Cruz River in Patagonia (the last wild river in Argentina): this monumental piece doesn't just recreate a perfect satellite view of the area, but it is a social commentary as it shows the proposed site of two hydroelectricity super-dams on the Santa Cruz River that will have a combined installed capacity of 1,740 MW and that will destroy over half of the Santa Cruz River ecosystem.
This piece is therefore not just a map, but a call for awareness and a way to comment about the state of a particular area, an installation that prompts viewers to ponder about nature, pollution and deforestation.
Kehayoglou has so far produced also smaller pieces like her collection of eight prayer rugs, produced for the Hannah Ryggen triennial in Norway, and representing different natural areas and spaces. These rugs can be used as portable pieces of landsape or can be combined together to create a vast and varied landscape.
Kehayoglou's art usually moves from local landscapes, aerial views often captured by drones, but her message - preserving the environment before it is too late and promoting environmental awareness - is global.
Kehayoglou's pieces are part of collections all over the world: the Santa Cruz River installation is part of the National Gallery of Victoria collection (NGV), in Melbourne, for example. The artwork is currently featured in "She persists", a publication and online project about works in the NGV collection exploring the intersections of art, gender and protest through five themes - ambition, perseverance, activism, feminism and identity.
The fashion system also fell in love with Kehayoglou's works: as you may remember from a previous post, the documentary "Dries", a film that looks at the life and career of Belgian designer Dries Van Noten, opens with footage from the S/S 15 collection. In the film models walk on a runway characterised by colours that are vaguely reminiscent of the greenery in John Everett Millais' "Ophelia", but, if you look closer, you realise the long strip of moss and grass on which they are walking is actually a beautiful soft carpet by Kehayoglou.
Kehayoglou conceives her works as environments you can physically and mentally enter and, hopefully, they will be displayed in more museums and art institutions in the world.
In the past visitors could walk or lay on Kehayoglou's works on displays in galleries, a process that turned her monumental textile pieces into interactive artworks. At the moment, even in those countries that have lifted lockdown measures, people are advised not to touch things in public spaces or wear gloves. But let's hope that, one day soon, we can go back to touch dedicated installations in museums and galleries. Interactive and sensory experiences can indeed have a therapeutic effect and will help to visually and physically heal those people who reported high depressive symptoms during lockdown or quarantene.
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