Keywords: australia, installation, melbourne, melinda capp, paper, paper-cutting, thread, victoria, cotton, glass, pinhole drawing, pins

Fragile

Melinda Capp

Dimensions

1600 x 1300 mm

Materials

Paper installation: paper cutting and pinhole drawing using white laboratory glass fibre paper, Unryu Japanese paper, pastel paper, acrylic paint, cotton thread and pins

Artist statement

‘My interest in lace began when I was a child visiting my grandmother. I was intrigued with the doilies she had displayed around her house. I liked their laciness, their prettiness and the way they seemed to give an air of importance to the other objects on and around them.

I am interested in playing with the notion of the doily as a symbol of beauty and a mass-produced, disposable consumer item with links to both tradition and modernity. My work plays with the tensions between beauty and kitsch. As Celeste Olalquiaga suggests, ‘kitsch tells us about the conflict between the real and the artificial, tradition and modernity, nostalgia and melancholy’.

The insects, spiders and birds decorating my doilies act as metaphors to express emotion and create tension. They question our notion of beauty and what lies behind. Shadows also create a sense of the ‘other’, the dark side.’