Marina Dempster’s hybrid art practice is born out of her own hybrid cultural identity: born in Mexico, to British and French parents, Dempster has lived in Canada since the age of three. Her fiber art finds cultural connections from across the continents, and retains a powerful personal quality. The main focus of her work is a contemporary translation of the pre-Columbian Huichol (Mexican Indian) tradition of “yarn painting”, labour intensive sculptures which incorporate both textile and painting modes.
Mannequin legs, glove moulds and shoe lasts, or shoes themselves, are amongst the three-dimensional detritus onto which she works her yarn paintings. The sculptures, which can take weeks or months to complete, become records of her process of working through her own entanglements and personal transformations and whose motifs are informed by personal and natural symbols.
Their personal mappings or tracks speak to us at a deeper level where our latent hopes and fears are reflected. In this attentive and time-honoured process, she concerns herself with issues of personal connection to one’s histories & futures by nurturing our narratives, environments, creatures, communities and cultures.
Marina Dempster’s improvised and incidental process also ironically speaks to the obsessive, repetitive and cyclical nature of thought patterns and actions, and the deliberate navigation and simultaneous ‘letting go’ required for adaptive growth, fluid change and reinvention. What distinguishes an errant path from a straight one? What unites us as human beings, and what fearful obstacles are in the way of seeing ourselves, and each other, with joyful compassion?
For information about the traditional Huichol origins of the technique of yarn painting please visit the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival & Traditional Arts.
Mannequin legs, glove moulds and shoe lasts, or shoes themselves, are amongst the three-dimensional detritus onto which she works her yarn paintings. The sculptures, which can take weeks or months to complete, become records of her process of working through her own entanglements and personal transformations and whose motifs are informed by personal and natural symbols.
Their personal mappings or tracks speak to us at a deeper level where our latent hopes and fears are reflected. In this attentive and time-honoured process, she concerns herself with issues of personal connection to one’s histories & futures by nurturing our narratives, environments, creatures, communities and cultures.
Marina Dempster’s improvised and incidental process also ironically speaks to the obsessive, repetitive and cyclical nature of thought patterns and actions, and the deliberate navigation and simultaneous ‘letting go’ required for adaptive growth, fluid change and reinvention. What distinguishes an errant path from a straight one? What unites us as human beings, and what fearful obstacles are in the way of seeing ourselves, and each other, with joyful compassion?
For information about the traditional Huichol origins of the technique of yarn painting please visit the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival & Traditional Arts.
