Project88 is pleased to present Blurred Lines, a solo exhibition by Australian artist Maggie Baxter. The exhibition features new works by Maggie Baxter that appropriate traditional textile practices to address concerns surrounding notions of repetition, arbitrariness, and disintegration.
Baxter has engaged and collaborated with local block printers and embroiderers in Kutch for the past thirty years. In her own practice, she adapts their craft practices so that they no longer serve their original aesthetic or cultural functions. She layers hand-woven cotton fabrics with linear patterns and suggestions of text by block-printing repetitively to conjure a sense of dissonance. The print that is conducive to blurriness and ambiguity is then juxtaposed with hand-stitching and embroidery, sometimes deliberately precise and at other times apparently random with loose ends dangling.
By blatantly disobeying the conventions governing the techniques she adopts, her process draws attention to conceptual qualities. Through highly tactile depictions and engagements, Baxter uses fabric to explore immaterial ideas, particularly concerning the arbitrary construction of meaning, the elusive character of perfection, and the process of dissolution and abstraction through the repetitive act of printing. An ostensibly traditional material, textile through Baxter’s practice comes across as a potent medium for contemporary art.