Ongoing Conversation, Recall, Recollect, Reconstruct will be on view December 20th, 2019 – January 5th, 2020. The exhibition will be held at the prestigious Kyoto International Community House (Kokoka) and will feature artists from Canada, Iran, Japan, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, the United States and the Netherlands. www.kcif.or.jp
Gerda Schimmel / the Netherlands, works with discarded “cleaning rags” from the offset printing industry. This cleaning cloth is a non-woven disposable that is used after a print run to clean the presses of the remnants of printing ink. This light blue, clean strip of textile is allowed to run through the presses. This way the excess ink is included in the cleaning cloth and the offset presses are ready for the next printing run. To the artist the cleaning cloth is the metaphor for a society on the road to sustainability. It has been used for writing, deleted and reused. The circles represent the iris of the eye, our focus on the world.
The cleaning rags are fleece thin, as wide as the printing press is, about 6 to 8 meter long. Schimmel folds them up to the height of the object, creating long narrow strips. These are threaded by hand according to different rhythms, to create the correct shape. Afterwards own ink is added to add Schimmel’s own story and to fix the color.
Schimmel’s work will be shown in Recall, Recollect, Reconstruct at #kyotointernationalcommunityhouse December 2019 – January 2020. For more information about Gerda Schimmel, visit her website www.gerdaschimmel.nl or her Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/gerdaschimmel/