Where the Waves Begin
2019
Where the Waves Begin is a silk banner made with bilateral drawing, mono printing, and layered photography. After loss, complex grief and inter-generational trauma, it is what remains.
With a nod to tasseography, marks are gathered through ritual action and collated onto a silk veil. The banner is hung from carved, burnt silky oak, stained with blood, holy water, weed pigment, and ink. I draw with both hands simultaneously, working with body and environment as intertwined sites of biography that cannot be spoken directly.
I had to learn to walk again. My pelvis, like the land it stands on, is a contested site carrying trauma. As I work, histories surface without being summoned. Silences loosen. Other records become possible. I begin to see how I was taught to believe I came from no place.
On Mother’s Day I found a mummified sea snake shaped like infinity at the edge of the ocean. I buried it in the dunes beneath coloured cliffs, where the earth heaves with the breath of women returning what was made back to the sea. They took the infinite mother snake and pushed her toward the place where the waves begin.
My mother had been in my cupboard for two years. I took her bones and placed them in the ocean at this site. The ground heaved. Women pushed. Waves broke. A death and a birth moved together. Oceans came from my eyes as she returned.
I thought I would know something new afterward. Instead I knew less. Closer to nothing. A shedding of skin. Warm breath disappearing into cold wind.
The banner carries this sequence as a biography that could not otherwise be held. A record of feminine experience written back into a place where it was expected to remain unspoken.
Nessun Posto @ Trocadero Art Space 2019
Tamara Baillie, Camila Galaz, Karla Pringle, Siying Zhou
Curated by Andrée Ruggeri
Project Space: August 7 – August 24
Artist Talk: Saturday August 17, 2pm
An undefined position of inquiry, inhabited by some, from which investigations of identity, intergenerational memory, language and place emerge.
These artists navigate from complex personal, geographical, and cultural vantage points, sitting somewhere along a liminal-liminoid continuum. Connecting with inherited experiences, or challenging what these might look like, the works in this exhibition explore associated traumas, gaps, and languages. Forgotten, welcomed, uninvited, translated.
Karla Pringe, Where the waves begin, 2019, Eco print on silk satin, carved, burnt and stained tenugui
With a nod to tasseography, ritualistic marks are collated and printed on silk, hung from a carved, burnt tenugui stained with blood, holy water, weed pigment, and ink. I draw with both hands, simultaneously focusing on my pelvic area as an exercise in integration and body awareness. I’ve had to learn to walk again and my pelvis, like the land it stands on is a contested site holding trauma. As I work, untold histories unfold, silences end, alternative records emerge, and I see why I was made to believe I come from ‘no place’.
Karla Pringle is an artist living and working on Kabi Kabi land. Her practice is heavily influenced by, and often refers to, the history of women’s body politics; mental health, domestic crafts, home-remedies and spiritualism, functioning as sites of slippage, subversion and rebellion.
