In yesterday's post we mentioned embroidered items from Sardinia, but there is a Sardinian artisan who used traditional techniques to create a very personal modern glossary, Maria Lai (1919-2013).
Lai decorated for example bedsheets with embroideries that, from a distance, look like words. When you get closer, though, you realise that the words stitched on the fabric are unintelligible, or rather, they are unintelligible for all those people who can read and write.
According to Lai, these stitched words could instead be perfectly understood by those women who couldn't read nor write but who used the language of embroideries to express their thoughts, feelings and stories. Once Lai stated indeed that, when she saw her grandmother mending bedsheets, she imagined she was writing stories to tell to her grandchildren. These threads symbolise therefore the solemn act of transferring a secret code or a lost language on fabric, creating in this way a visual symphony and stitching together memories as well.
Lai's bedsheets are going to be featured in an exhibition opening next week in Mantua, Italy. "Cucire il tempo" (Stitching Time) at the Pescherie (Fish market), a recently restored historical building designed by architect and painter Giulio Romano in the 16th century, is an exhibition divided in three parts, each of them featuring two women artists both exhibiting in the same venue for 20 days. Sonia Costantini and Maria Lai open the first part of the event (from 7th to 26th September 2021) that will feature Marta Allegri and Irene Lanza in October and Rosanna Bianchi Piccoli and Antonella Zazzera between October and November.
The exhibition looks at artists who build through their works a sort of tapestry using different materials and getting inspired by everyday actions and events: apart from the bedsheets, the section dedicated to Maria Lai will also feature works from the 1990s, when she went back to Sardinia after living in Rome. Among the other works on display there will be her "telai di guerra" (war looms), works integrating newspaper cuttings, threads and unraveling crocheted doilies, elements that lose their original function to become symbols of daily routines broken and shattered by other events.
In the first part of the event Sonia Costantini’s monochrome paintings will be in dialogue with Maria Lai’s works, but there will also be an audio-visual section with Tonino Casula's film documenting Lai's performance "Legarsi alla montagna" (To Tie Oneself to the Mountain) a performance made in 1981 in which the artist tied the houses together with ribbons of blue cloth which was then tied to the mountain above the village.
In this way Lai and the community strengthened the physical bond between human beings and nature, while the knots and bows of the blue ribbons also symbolised the relationships between the families living in the town.
The performance was inspired by a Sardinian fairy tale about a young girl who climbs a mountain to take food to the shepherds. As a storm breaks out and she takes refuge in a cave with the shepherds and their sheep, but, seeing a mysterious blue ribbon in the sky, she runs outside and saves herself from a landslide that kills everybody else.
The blue ribbon still speaks to us, forty years after the performance took place as it can be interpreted as a metaphor representing art and beauty that can save us. Through it Maria Lai tells us that the blue ribbon of her performance can still save us, it can connect us with the past and help us weaving a future, bringing us all together.
Image credits for this post
1.
Maria Lai
Untitled
1982
Linen, cotton and threads
240 x 72 cm
Courtesy © Archivio Maria Lai by Siae 2021
2 and 3.
Maria Lai
Telaio di guerra (War Loom)
1991
Paper, ink, threads
52x62 cm
Courtesy © Archivio Maria Lai by Siae 2021
4 and 5.
Maria Lai
Legarsi alla montagna (To Tie Oneself to the Mountain)
1981
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