Fabric and textile sculptures can help us investigating a wide range of issues, including our bodies and senses as we saw in yesterday's post, or our identity as Nastassja E. Swift teaches us. This fiber artist redefines indeed the concept of portraiture in her soft sculptures made with felting wool.
A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, with a major in Painting and Printmaking and a minor in Craft and Material Studies, Swift, who lives and works in Virginia, first started her practice as an oil painter and printmaker.
Yet, she soon moved onto working with fibers, creating sculptures and pieces that have been exhibited throughout the city of Richmond, in neighbouring cities in Virginia as well as Tennessee, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Her work is permanently displayed at The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia and it is also part of the Contemporary Arts Network Foundation collection.
Swift's felt sculptures are inspired by West African masks and Yoruba ritual practices and through them the artist explore issues such as identity and in particular the juxtaposition between the definition and the disruption of the self.
The artist grew up in a white neighbourhood, but at her school most kids were black and she experienced racism from a black vs white standpoint and from a black vs black standpoint, as she was accused of trying to grow up as a white kid among black people, an experience that may have informed her sculpture "I Wanted to Give You the Ocean", representing a Black girl made with white felting wool.
Some of her felt sculptures are composition of multiple small heads, others are monumental and Swift also creates wearable masks with felt.
Her felt pieces are conceived as vessels for stories, physical expedients to narrate Black experiences and memories; they are created as embodiments of ancestral presences that seem to guide Swift's hands as she creates these pieces starting from the face, then moving onto the details like the half-closed eyes and the hair, neatly sculpted in braids, cornrows, and twists.
For a previous project, the collaborative performance "Remembering Her Homecoming: From the North Atlantic to Leigh Street," premiered at the Afrikana Independent Film Festival in 2019, she used her needle-felted white masks to hint at cotton and slavery.
The project was inspired by Shockoe Bottom, an area in Richmond, Virginia, where there were slave jails. The video opens with the words "As a black woman in America, you're always wearing a mask: am I too loud if I say this, will I be too black, will they like me, will they hire me, will they fight me, will they kill me?" and follows a group of eight black women dressed in white and wearing Swift's giant wool masks, dancing and singing freedom songs along the Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia.
Remembering Her Homecoming from Nastassja Swift on Vimeo.
As they dance, the women, almost looking like the chorus performers in an ancient Greek tragedy, re-enact movements and songs sung by their ancestors while simultaneously revealing the violent and complex history of these places.
So the film becomes a way for the artist to question her Black identity, life and death, while exploring the concepts of belonging, of inhabiting a space, feeling at home, being part of a community and returning home.
Reaching the trail's end in Jackson Ward, a district in Richmond with a long tradition of African-American businesses, is a metaphor for the women, it represents the end of their journey and the possibility of removing their masks.
Racism, personal experiences and identity, are also the themes behind "Passage, When Momma Lets My Braids Flow Down My Back" (2021), a bright pink sculpture with smaller heads arranged in a gradient, and "Your Banks are Red Honey Where the Moon Wanders" (2020), Swift's self-portrait in deep red wool. These sculptures almost have a hieratic power and hint at worshipping not intangible gods, but real people.
"A party for Sojourner" is instead a direct reference to Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" that featured 39 place settings to commemorate important women in history. The only two non-white attendees to the party were the 19th century black abolitionist and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth and Sacagawea, a Shoshone interpreter and the only woman on the Lewis and Clark Expedition into the American West.
But, while other women's plates were creative representations of a vagina, Sojourner's plate seemed inspired by an African masks. So "A Party for Sojourner" composed with Black female felt faces in different tones is a way of acknowledging Sojourner's womanhood.
Swift is also a doll maker and produces smaller handmade needle felted figures, organising also needle felting courses (check out her site D for Dolls to get further information about them; visit her Instagram page instead to go behind the scenes of her projects). Her latest project, "Canaan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice" will be unveiled at the Contemporary Arts Network in Newport on June 5, 2021.
The installation was inspired by Swift's brother, currently incarcerated within the Virginia Department of Corrections. It consists in a "Security Blanket", a glass beaded fabric quilt, occupying a space as big as her brother's prison cell that helps Swift creating a temporary environment where she can read her brother's letters and the letters written by other people who are incarcerated, tackling in this way key issues such as absence, erasure and mass incarceration,
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