AbsolventInnen- Ausstellung 2022/23

Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg
10/11/12.02.2023

Come to see my work “To spin a tale, Anna – Spinning process in 7 threads” at Ausstellungshalle AdBK Nürnberg!

The starting point for the work To spin a tale, Anna – Spinning process in 7 threads is a postcard I found on the wall of a public toilet on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The postcard features my grandmother Anna spinning wool on an old spinning wheel, as a tourist attraction at the Skye Museum of Island Life, Kilmuir, Skye. After moving to the island, my grandmother adopted several cultural techniques: she learnt how to dye wool, spin with a hand-spinning wheel, knit and weave.  As a migrated woman who acquired these traditional techniques she worked at the local museum, showing tourists how wool was once spun by hand by island women. In addition to the postcard this work explores an autobiographical novel by my grandmother Anna. The song “Spinning Jenny” (Skyclad, 1992) serves as a analogy: as the protagonist, the first spinning machine “Jenny” embodies a woman—triggering existential terror and fear and challenging transformation.

In a sense, this work attempts to express individual and collective memories by linking analog handicraft with language and transcribing it into a digital AI metaphor. My grandmother Anna becomes the threshold medium between machine analogies and the act of writing. The embedded narrative oscillates between the generated and manipulated output of an AI, and the recollection of a woman. The humming of my grandmother and the sound of the spinning machine mingle in a swelling song.

To spin a tale, Anna – Spinning process in 7 threads consists of 20 AI-generated images printed on Aluminum composite panel, a sound file and a text, which finds its form in machine-knitted fabric panels. The text was translated into knitwear in collaboration with the textile designer Zuzana Ševčíková.