A Thousand Fibres Connect Us | Unit 3 Projects
Private View: Friday 6 October 6pm to 8pm
Open: Sat 7, Sun 8, Sat 14 and Sun 15 from 10am to 6pm (and by appointment)
Unit 3 Projects | ASC Studios, Unit 3, Empson Street, E3 3LT
A Thousand Fibres Connect Us
Lizzie Hughes and Faza Merajdin
Lizzie Hughes and Faza Merajdin met as students at The Slade School of Fine Art in the mid 90’s. In 2022 after a chance encounter, they began sharing a studio in Bromley-by-Bow. This exhibition is a culmination of the first year of creating work independently in the same space.
Whilst there is no inherent connection between the two artists’ work, early exposure to the same tutors, methodologies and exhibitions, along with lifelong joint friendships have undeniably led to a shared sensibility. A meticulous and economical approach to crafting work is clearly important to both artists.
Lizzie Hughes has worked with many different mediums including sound, video and installation. In A Thousand Fibres Connect us, she is showing a series of wall-based sculptures made in part from precious metal. The work stems from a residency she undertook in Hill End, a former gold mining town in New South Wales. The sculptures include a net made from golden thread, fragile frameworks supporting nothing more than voids and structures that could suggest archaic tools or oversized jewellery.
During the gold rush Hill End had a population of over 8000 people, today less than 100 residents live there. Over the course of the residency long walks exploring absences became part of the everyday. The streets of the depleted town are still visible as are the mine shafts and machinery that once crushed the ore rich rocks. Crucially although the gold is no longer found in abundance, it continues to make these absences alluring. The frequent and somewhat treacherous holes found in the landscape, that feed into the sculpture, aren’t the negative space we might gaze through in a modernist sculpture, but rather charged voids hinting at the riches that were once there and the spoils left behind.
For over twenty years Faza Merajdin has steadfastly committed to the investigation of light. Her work is an outcome of consistently conversant practices in printmaking and painting with each acting as process and investigative space for the other. Faza uses patterns derived from sacred geometry as the means to hold light. Her paintings, informed by the drag and blur of screen printing processes serve as planes of distortion and sites of vibration.
Faza’s exploration of pattern stems from her visits to family in Kenya. The complexity of light in indoor markets in Nairobi, filtered through perforated screens (jaalis), enables constantly mobile patterns and shadows to dominate the objective reality of place and space. Faza’s paintings juxtapose the active play of peripheral light and shade in everyday experience with the meditative stillness of the jaali in the Muslim mystical tradition. The fleeting glance, the fragile screen with its voids and disappearances, and intense light, are explored as sites of blindness, revelation, and inquiry.
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