Two outstanding textile artists present their highly individual interpretations of the Pacific Ocean in Pacific: Sea States, a new exhibition opening at Newcastle’s Timeless Textiles in March.

Pacific: Sea States presents fine felt art garments created by Fiona Duthie and Katia Mokeyeva, two independent artists with strong connections to their environment and the sea. Both live and create near the Pacific but in very different coastal environments – Fiona on a small island off the coast of Canada and Katia on the northern Californian coast in the USA.
Yet each of the artists has developed a clear artistic narrative out of their geographic relationship to the ocean, which explores a common relationship with the sea and its states of being. The term sea states refers to the overall condition of a large body of water—with respect to wind, swell and current—at a particular moment and location.

The artists explore each sea state as a beautiful metaphor for their own personal, overall condition, which provides them with an excellent platform for exploring surface design through feltmaking.

Pacific: Sea States features twelve main sculptural wearable garments, one each for the twelve defined Beaufort sea states. The surface textures and tensions escalate with each state, just as the winds and waves do for sailors around the world.

 
Katia lives on the coast near San Francisco, a place filled with ocean winds and fog coming in from the sea; a place where the weather can change from bright and sunny to gloomy and dark every day. Her work not only depicts different behaviors of the sea but also focuses on associative images that arise within her under the influence of stillness or a raging storm.

“From the feeling of complete calm, to utter unbridled force, such is the human capability of being in different emotional conditions,” Katia said. “In this project, I try to develop the fundamental theme of the connection of humanity to nature and seek self-understanding through analogies of nature’s events.”

Opens from 4-6pm on 17 March and runs until 10 April 2016 at Timeless Textiles