‘tightly wound’ features textile works from Danish Quapoor’s recent good grief series, recontextualising them amongst related works.
The title references both the laborious process of creating the works and the related personal memories, anxieties and catalytic concepts explored within. These include grief, memorialisation, prophesies, expectations, gender roles and sexuality.
The works within ‘tightly wound’ were initially creative responses to a series of anxiety-driven catalysts and memories. These included Quapoor’s father’s unexpected death, unwelcome revelations of the artist’s bisexuality and enforced heteronormative gender roles in his upbringing.
Quapoor’s use of repurposed baling twine for these works is significant, memorialising bittersweet memories of farming and baling lucerne hay with his father. The artist slowly, repetitively builds up the monochromatic forms by coiling and stitching the twine onto itself. These laborious processes do enable some catharsis for Quapoor, who also tempers and obfuscates the personal to embed a life-affirming levity within.
“I have abstracted and layered personal details throughout these textile forms, but the memories and experiences are sometimes just a catalyst or a reference. I hope that the materiality, the aesthetics and the hidden details of the works will resonate with audiences as much as the underlying themes and concepts.”
– Danish Quapoor
