My most recent series, the sewn collages, bridges past and present personal circumstances through new media, continuing my focused exploration of color, form, and structure that has been central to my artistic practice since its inception.
Sewn Collages
2021-2024
Multiple series
Various materials: cotton fabric (duck canvas), cotton paper, acrylic, polyester thread
Variable measures
“Sewings L 01”,
2023
Sewn collage
Cotton fabric, polyester thread
On February 28, 2023, I finished “Sewings L 01,” the first in a long line of sewn collages—now over 300 pieces. In this work, I used cuts of canvas fabric (colored duck canvas, 100% cotton) and polyester thread, part of a series in various sizes. This piece measures 30” x 36”. Changing from acrylic painting on canvas to working with colored duck canvas has been a powerful experience, letting me dive back into the same issues that have defined my relationship with art for forty years: color, form, matter, composition, spatiality, and structure.
From the “Hilos” series,
2023
Sewn collage
Cotton paper, acrylic, polyester thread
From the “Sewings M” series
2022
Sewn collage
Cotton fabric, polyester thread
From the “Park” series
2023
Sewn collage
Cotton paper, acrylic, polyester thread
From the “Empire” series
2023
Sewn collage on canvas
Cotton fabric, cotton paper, acrylic, staples, polyester thread
Since 2021, I have been exploring in a new body of work the impact that the social structures of my childhood in the 1950s had on me. I was born in Maracaibo, a city highly influenced by foreign oil companies. The mixture of these very different cultures—Venezuelan, Dutch, American, British, and German—placed me in a liminal space where I had to contend with various languages, discourses, foods, manners, and traditions daily.
This multiculturalism has emerged in my work since mid-2021, after a year of pandemic isolation that led to a more introspective phase in my career. This time has prompted me to use a new vocabulary of forms and color palettes. Additionally, the impossibility of using paint in my new studio due to city regulations forced me to look for a way to paint without paint, finding alternative means to rethink and recreate the visual grammar of my upbringing. I traded staples and staplers for thread and a sewing machine to convey the impact of bureaucracy on my work in a more intimate way.
In my sewn collage series “Sewings,” “Hilos,” “Azul Petróleo,” and “Empire,” I draw with threads expressing a sense of urgency by deliberately creating irregular seams over the colored cotton fabric and paper. These uneven seams and untrimmed threads hold the cutouts together—fragments of the modernity promised to me by a country in development financed by oil revenues—and become an essential component of the language of the work.
My most recent series bridges past and present personal circumstances through new media, sustaining the rigorous exploration of color, form, and structure that has been central to my artistic practice since the beginning.
To visit my studio:
Please schedule an appointment by emailing vandalen@patriciavandalen.com