Contact Performance Turbante by Thaís Muniz. Photograph: Shai Andrade
STORIES OF NATURE and culture have been weaved together in a new gallery exhibition at glór.
Textile artists, Thaís Muniz, and Laura Vaughan currently have their work on display in glór. The duo responded to the use of patterns and repetition in fabric designs and explored how these can connect us to places in an exhibition now showing in the gallery entitled Place after Pattern after Place.
An independent shop-owner in Ennis, Laura creates her own digital print based on landscape scenes in the west of Ireland. She uses her designs to create household objects that bring rural Ireland into the home. After graduating with a degree in Interior Architecture and moving on to work for design practices in the UK and Ireland she opened a studio and gift shop in Ennis, Co. Clare.
Vaughan returned to college in 2010 to study textiles and then completed a digital print residency at Glasgow School of Art. She then started combining her background in Interiors and textiles to start her practice of making lampshades, and as part of Creative Island at Showcase in 2016, she launched her own range of digitally printed homewares, which includes lampshades with matching cushions, aprons, tea towels, and napkins. All of her creations are designed, printed and made in Ireland.
Afro-diasporic connections, identity, belonging and migration are the interests of interdisciplinary artist and designer, Thaís Muniz. Her art practices emerge from the need to shatter the status quo when it comes to the representation of Black bodies, to empower and to rescue identities, histories, building bridges and opening conversations. She uses textiles, storytelling, interactive performances, audio-visuals, workshops, and urban interventions to share narratives from an anti-colonial perspective, connecting people and uplifting histories.
Since 2012 Muniz has pioneered research on turbans and headwraps in Afro-Atlantic culture and its place in art, politics, and aesthetics, by creating Turbante-se, a movement and platform, which follows the mystery and beauty of turbans and headwraps in the Afro-Atlantic diaspora – its traditions, new meanings, and usage, as tool and connection object. This movement has empowered Black communities from all over the world with an array of practices and actions. She has been based in Dublin since 2014.
For the glór exhibition which runs until August 6th, the two artists have come together to tell stories of nature and culture. An extensive workshop and performance programme will take place as part of this exhibition. Workshops are limited capacity and early booking advised. Laura’s lampshade design workshop takes place on Saturday July 16th with Turbante-se Headwraps with Thaís running a week later on Saturday July 23rd. Visual artist, Vicky Smith will be holding a repeat pattern textile workshop for older children on Saturday July 30th.
