Eszter Bornemisza’s recent work explores linkages between physical or virtual places and memory. Layers of clear and chaotic map fragments visualise  the city as palimpsest, the present built on top of the past, physically as well as embedded in its cultural and social life.

Her works reflect a spirit of cartography  where town plans are transported into unfamiliar territory. Budapest is her city and inspiration springs from her relationship to its life and layout, its webs and spaces. She navigates adventurously between maps of the physical world and the mind world of perception.

Layered transparent maps are also used as a metaphor for the search for identity. Finding points of reference both physically and mentally, discovering relations and patterns may reveal paths in the jungle of information.

In her recent work, newspaper is the basic material telling symbolism — newspapers deliver deluges of information from which we must sift the true from the fake. Here today but soon of interest only to historians, they rapidly become transient detritus. But Eszter saves it from immediate obsolescence by transforming it into intricate networks, inserting fragments of other ephemeral items like X-ray films and integrated circuit films.

Artist links physical and virtual worlds in new exhibition.

Hungarian artist Eszter Bornemisza uses novel techniques and materials to explore the interface between real and virtual worlds, and memory, in her Linkagesexhibition, opening at Newcastle’s Timeless Textiles Gallery in March.

Layers of clear map fragments are chaotically layered to portray her home city of Budapest as palimpsest. The present builds on top of the past, combining physical visualisations of the city with those of its cultural and social life.

Bornemisza’s works reflect a spirit of cartography where town plans are transported into unfamiliar territory. Her inspiration springs from her relationship to the life and layout of Budapest, its webs and spaces. She navigates adventurously between maps of the physical world and the mind world of perception.

Layered transparent maps are also used as a metaphor for the search for identity. Finding points of reference both physically and mentally, discovering relations and patterns may reveal paths in the jungle of information.

In her recent work, newspaper is the basic material. Newspapers deliver a deluge of information. The reader must sift the true from the fake. The news is here today but rapidly consigned to history. Bornemisza’s works salvage newsprint from obsolescence by transforming it into intricate networks. She draws stimulating Linkagesby inserting fragments of other ephemeral items like films of X-rays and integrated circuits.

Linkages will run from  8^thApril til 3 May 2020, with the opening night on 9 April 6-8pm

Layered exhibition reveals complex urban narratives

Multi-layered surfaces of real and imaginary maps create a rich urban narrative in a new exhibition by Hungarian-based fibre artist Eszter Bornemisza, opening at Newcastle’s Timeless Textiles Gallery in January.

Mathematically trained, Bornemisza has been practicing as a fibre artist since the mid-1990s. She brings a unique spatial perspective to her works with recycled paper, textiles and other found soft materials.

The basic process of her creation is machine stitching, with additional elements of printing dyeing and painting. After having made art quilts for more than ten years, her interest has turned to creating transparent wall-hangings, objects and installations using ripped, overprinted newspaper.

Her new exhibition, Urban Narratives, uses these techniques to represent the layers of existence, the past and present cultures of urban places.

“I have chosen to use newspaper because it provides further visual evidence of the ephemeral nature of our urban narratives,” she said. “It is fragile, the content is sometimes obsolete at the hour of appearance, while still bearing fragments of important details from the near history. It also represents the overwhelming avalanche of fake and relevant news we have to distinguish day by day.”

Her work revolves around ideas that reflect our relations to urban life. With the multi-layered surfaces of real and imaginary maps Bornemisza strives to represent our search to identify with place, both physically and mentally.

“Experimentation and research have been my primary tools for developing ideas,” she explains. “Labyrinth-like maps, with many dead-end streets, have been a visual metaphor for my journey to find my identity as an artist.”

Bornemisza is inspired by the graphical layout of urban maps, old, new, real and imaginary.

“I am interested in imprints of ages in the earth and in our minds, signs and traces and their meanings for us, their personal and social narratives,” she said. “A city’s street network is like its skeleton — a foundation for features that can bring people together or tear them apart. It is an imprint of how communities have used or abused their dwelling place.”

The fragmented, distorted or disintegrated city plans are used as the silt of the past, blended with modern highway and metro layouts, patterns of present urban life. Bornemisza’s works display maps as imprints of the way people live in a system. Labyrinth-like, the imagery offers rich ground for associations, deepening our understanding of our life and circumstances.

Urban Narratives will run at Timeless Textiles from 16 January to 10 February.

HOLDING: Contemporary fibre art

HOLDING: Contemporary fibre artpresents a unique and diverse range of fibre art. Showcasing 25 international, national and local fibre artists, the exhibition explores – through textile mediums and techniques – ideas around containment and ownership. The exhibition is curated by Anne Kempton Director of Timeless Textiles, the only dedicated textile fibre art Gallery in Australia.

From smaller and intricate works of art like that of American artist Shannon Weber’s Amulet 2016using wire hemp and stone, to larger scale works such as Newcastle artist Brett Alexander’s five metre high Every time I have sex I think I might die (PEP/Prep version) 2016,

this exhibition expands on Kempton’s ideas around the ‘vessel’ as a form in contemporary fibre art and in this context is represented both physically and conceptually. Kempton states;

“The title HOLDING can allude to a sense of belonging, homeliness, security and memories. For me it’s a gentle nurturing of our souls, our world and each other. The materials for each of these works of art have been created or reused, held (sometimes times for long periods of time) in the artist’s hands during the making process.”

The environment is also a source of inspiration for many textile artists; drawing upon the world around them using both natural and synthetic materials, each artist is the primary creator of their work, all of which are layered with personal and individual meanings. In the Shelter 2016 by Western Australian artist Nalda Searles combines parts of a salvaged doll with native plant fibres and grasses held together using her own unique form of stitching.

HOLDING brings together fibre artists from Austria, Canada, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA as well as Australia and Newcastle revealing their deft ability with the fibre textile medium and the realisation of this in three dimensional objects.