Keywords: australia, embroidered, karen richards, nylon, victoria, warrnambool, animation, cotton, machine, music

Secret Forest

Karen Richards

Dimensions

500 x 500 x 500 mm, 1.56 min (duration)

Materials

Machine lace ‘set’ and animation: figures created in machine-embroidered cotton and nylon monofilament lace on dissolvable plastic; music by Tim Umney

Artist statement

‘My recent work, in machine-embroidered lace on dissolvable plastic, has been exploring the fragility of the landscape. Now I have taken it a step further by making an animation which allows the viewer to travel through this fragile world.

Lace is perfect for expressing a delicate or even brittle world. Its see-through qualities suggest skeletal forms, the inner structures of decayed matter, the organic and worn away. The ‘interplay of space, light and shadows and the mystery of concealment’ that freeform lace can offer helps to create a secret forest and, in this case, one that we can enter into.

The inspiration comes from photographs I have taken of dead trees around south-west Victoria. As is often the case I thought I was making a piece about the environment but have made a piece reflecting piece reflecting the creative process — of being lost and circling back to your starting point.’