natalie sirett: kevin, wishes & charms
April 17 - May 15, 2021
Press Release
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Ro2 Art is proud to present Kevin, Wishes & Charms a solo exhibition featuring new works by artist Natalie Sirett. The show will run from April 17 through May 15, 2021. The exhibition will open with an artist reception at Ro2 Art the Cedars located at 1501 S Ervay St, Dallas, TX and will take place from 12-5 PM.
Natalie Sirett is a British artist trained in academic painting and printmaking. Her newest body of work is informed by the survival of her own body, now in remission after undergoing ten months of treatment for cancer. Sirett hand embroidered over fifty antique handkerchiefs as she processed coming to terms with her own mortality. The intimacy of these textiles; square patches of fabric that hold joy, uncertainty, sadness, loss, happiness and hope, are a compelling choice of substrate for the artist’s words to exist on. The images take shape on a background of memory, pierced, looped, and needle-worked into Sirett’s compositions. These fiber art pieces, as well as several assemblage sculptures have never before been exhibited. |
artist statement
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K is for Kevin is a series of fifty-four embroideries on handkerchiefs. The words, phrases and images are taken from a steroid-fuelled diary, written over a period of ten months during breast cancer treatment. The diary, as diaries should be, is private. It’s a proper out-pouring, written in the middle the night when steroids, taken to mitigate chemotherapy drugs, meant there was no escape, not even in sleep. Once I moved into remission, I was resistant to adding to what I saw as a glut of cancer narratives out there in culture and the media but I gradually came to understand that I didn’t have a choice in the matter. As any survivor knows, from the moment of diagnosis onwards, once the ‘C word’ is said, you are never cancer ‘free’, it just hasn’t come back yet. Your task is to learn to live in the ‘new-normal’. This contradictory phrase, familiar to all because of Covid 19 but long established as part of advice to cancer patients was something I wrestled with, I could find nothing normal in my new landscape. In time I began realise that in order to accept and move on with cancer now a companion in life, I had no choice but to make something, to make work that expressed, marked, mapped and witnessed my experience.
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about the artist
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Natalie Sirett was born in Heswall, Cheshire and currently lives and works in London. She received a BA in Fine Art from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and studied painting and printmaking at the Royal Academy Schools, London. Her work explores symbols and stories embedded in our culture.
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