“To make living itself an art, that is the goal…”
-- Henry Miller
Born in Sweden in 1950, Mick Lindberg began her career as a model and then pursued photography before dedicating herself to needlework as a fine art. Weaving together these ventures has been the artist’s passion for textiles, which she has traced to her Scandinavian upbringing when she was taught needlework by her mother and grandmother.
Whilst Lindberg’s textiles are richly textured as they incorporate an array of vintage fabrics which are given to her by friends, they gain depth and complexity also by blending together imaginative worlds with reality, as well as diverse times – past, present, and future. As the artist has explained:
“I often receive, through the generosity of friends, bags and boxes of old cloth and fabrics…from fragments of cloth, sometimes a whole character emerges, like a genie from a bottle… evoking the memory of someone’s grandmother, or maybe a naughty aunt. I’m often asked where I draw the inspiration for my characters, I always say – ‘they come to me’. The fabric fragments from friends give me a sense of continuity, where I’m allowed to stitch my own story…in between the layering of memory and time.”
Taking her interests in totality and the interlacing of life and art further, this exhibition presents fourteen recent works based on the cycle of the zodiac. Together, they offer an opportunity to reflect on the wealth and scope of existence, as well as the expressive potential of fabrics and thread.