Margot Samel is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Elizabeth Radcliffe (b.1949, Edinburgh, Scotland). This is Radcliffe’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Serving as acts of dedication, Elizabeth Radcliffe’s weavings memorialise moments in her life, and are imbued with a considerable amount of her labour. There is a striking continuity of concern between works completed four decades ago, based upon waxed motorcycle jackets, and a more recent series that takes tennis wear as its subject. In each, a garment points to the sartorial sensibility of its wearer, and provides a set of material conditions that form the basis of Radcliffe’s enquiry. Highly attentive to the tactile finish of the fabric that she is replicating by other means, she employs a range of materials that are both natural and synthetic. Another distinctive feature of her output, including her most recent offerings, is the use of a shaped silhouette. Appearing as if cut from the fabric of his surroundings, a portrait of Marc Camille-Chaimowicz harbours affinities with the milieu in which her approach was formed; a 1970s Edinburgh populated by figures such as the Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi and director of the Dovecot Tapestry Studio Archie Brennan. These are points of reference that Radcliffe has absorbed, repurposing them to her own ends.
In spite of the formal innovations that she brings to the medium, Radcliffe conceives of her practice as staunchly part of a lineage of tapestry weaving, as opposed to a more recent phenomenon such as fibre art. The distinction is crucial, not least because such categories have been all too frequently used to demarcate, and in many instances, denigrate areas of female creativity. As a discourse, fibre art emerged in the postwar period to destabilise a delineation between craft and fine art, and to draw into question the gendered dynamics that those categories perpetuate. And there are certainly moments where we can trace such concerns in Radcliffe’s work, with its recurring reference to domestic moments and the hand-crafted.
Nor should her identification as a tapestry weaver be regarded as antithetical to such aims. Rather, it affords an alternative route through which they might be achieved. Tapestry is an ancient discipline, one whose extended lifespan seems paralleled in the investiture of time required to render imagery in this manner. It provides a set of conditions in which Radcliffe revels, casting the things around herself in materials befitting of a medieval court. Meticulously picturing the world using the interplay of the warp and the weft serves as a way of elevating it, but is also a means of signalling ownership of one’s own time. The daily rhythms of Radcliffe’s studio practice, in which her weavings painstakingly take form, are hers alone to control. It is in this space that certain conventions can be flaunted, while others are actively flouted.
–Neil Clements
