Stitching the Image – By Jan Adlmann

The work of Thelma Mathias is in that well-worked vein of modernism that seeks to ally words with images into something considerably more meaningful than mere illustration

Stitching the Image

By Jan Adlmann

 

 

 

 

The work of Thelma Mathias is in that well-worked vein of modernism that seeks to ally words with images into something considerably more meaningful than mere illustration. Mathias describes her artistic role as a matter of process, the use of material as language. Effectively, in many of her recent works, Mathias uses the written word as a particular mode of entry into the realms of visual poetry; this strategy is nowhere more apparent, nor more successful, than in her assemblage piece entitled The Rose.

Unfurling itself on the wall somewhat as the flower itself unfolds, The Rose commingles the myriad associations we may well have with a woman’s dress, with the rose (the most numinous of flowers), and with the fanciful text embroidered along the garment’s hem. If, as Huxley has said, words form the thread on which we string our experiences, then Thelma Mathias uses such narrative threads—literally and figuratively—to produce a gown redolent with the ineffable poetry of the rose itself. As a dreamy footnote to the dusty, battered rose corsage pinned to the bosom of this wistful robe, the artist has painstakingly (we cannot avoid the pungent image of women’s work) embroidered a deft quotation from St. Exupery’s Little Prince around the hem. The text, as we might expect, concerns a magical rose which was the little prince’s most prized possession, a red rose, unlike any other.

In a recent artist’s statement, Mathias underlines her intent in this and others of her works, saying, "one might view this work as a manipulation of text to suit a whole other purpose. There is an attempt to integrate what is seen with what is thought or read, with the visceral effect and the intellect.

In the small assemblage The Night of the Terrible Dance, Mathias affixes a small, black book with the title along its spine (Die Nacht der Schrecklichen Taenze) to the wall, jutting outwards. Pooled on the top of this sinister-seeming, slender volume, the artist has dripped bee’s wax, some frightful ooze, which seems either to issue from or fall back into the text itself. The book has been deconstructed line by line, and glued together to form a single stream of words, which spirals out of a hanging, cast paper teapot. In some ineffable way, this modified found object crystallizes a kind of Edgar Allen Poe sense of dread or premonition.

Another series of works in the current exhibition, entitled "The Dishtowel Series", again utilizes the homeliest textiles imaginable, common kitchen towels, as the backdrops for texts and illustrations which range from the fanciful and delightful to disturbing. In these fragile works, made with red inc on linen and paper towel, Mathias combines charming, squiggly drawings of fairy-tale figures with seemingly utterly, inappropriate texts, to startling effect. Bunnies and crickets in evening dress disport over the surface of these tapestries, yet the typed texts include admonitory phrases from Feng Shui manuals, fictional fragments, and the design of the Edsel, or, in one instance, the trenchant thought that "Life disappoints". Theses irrational juxtapositions of images and texts generate confounded meanings and force the viewer to break down assumptions of innocence.