Tia Ansell | Building Patterns: {Suite} Ponsonby

Tia Ansell's weaving paintings explore the language of abstraction, symbolism, material culture and architectural structures. Her practice deconstructs the fundamental elements of a painting, by revealing the foundations of the woven substrate and its relationship with the painted image. 

In Building Patterns, Tia approaches the paintings as a lens allowing her a more abstract look at design, technique and geography. The exhibition reads the collection from this perspective, with the textiles reflecting weaving as architecture. Tia emphasises the influence of these textile patterns, referencing geometric shapes on facades of high-rise buildings. The combination of weaving and architecture demonstrates the blended possibility of a new patterned landscape. 

Weaving has an inherent relationship with architecture, and is constructed as an  immersive web and structural network that exchanges information on its substrate. Unlike most modes of making, weaving in its textile form has a surface that is also its structure, meaning  any pattern embedded in its substrate is still organically part of its surface structure. Each thread creates a whole mesh work surface that shifts from revealing and concealing its form. The combination of the blocked out, flat and geometric paint with the highly patterned mesh, breaks the sequence, vibrating and leaping from their fibre substrate.